UK trade phone answering study. What happened across 1,371 outbound calls.

The classified data contained 1,152 dials to working numbers. A person answered 491 of them. The remaining 661 did not reach a person: 431 rang out, 216 reached voicemail and 14 reached a machine, IVR or automated screening system.

• 42.6% reached a person

  491 of 1,152 dials to working numbers were answered by a person, including gatekeepers and receptionists.

• 57.4% did not

  661 working-number dials rang out, reached voicemail or reached an automated system instead of a person.

• 8.9% were unusable

  113 classified dials went to dead, wrong, disconnected or out-of-service published numbers.

There were 647 unanswered calls in the classified data. 431 of them—66.6%—rang out without reaching voicemail. The other 216 reached a voicemail service.

This finding says something useful about basic phone reachability: voicemail was not present on most of the unanswered calls in this outbound sample. It does not tell us whether the business later saw the missed call, returned it or would have behaved differently for a known customer.

Heating businesses, plumbers, gas engineers and electricians all landed within a narrow 3.7-point range. On this dataset, the trade label did not meaningfully predict whether an unknown caller would reach a person.

The classified dataset contained 903 unique businesses with a working number. 424 answered at least once; 479 never answered any attempt. This is the correct business count for that row-level view. The 1,371 headline is a call count, not a count of different businesses.

Retry result—with an important caveat

519 businesses missed the first dial, but only 108 were retried. Of those 108, 40 were eventually reached: 37%.

The data covers 18 March 2026 to 5 June 2026. We audited 38 dated cold-call logs and classified every recoverable row by call outcome. Business names and telephone numbers remain private and are not published.

1. 01

   Start with the logged total

   Frontmatter across the 38 logs records 1,371 dials. This is the study's top-line activity count.

2. 02

   Recover the row-level records

   1,301 rows were recovered from the per-lead tables and normalised into outcome records.

3. 03

   Classify actual attempts

   After removing skipped and non-dial records, the row-level analysis contains 1,265 actual attempts: 92.3% of the recorded total.

4. 04

   Keep splits inside the classified set

   Every percentage by outcome, trade, business and retry behaviour uses the classified data only. The 1,371 total is never used as the denominator for those splits.

A human pickup includes an owner, employee, gatekeeper or receptionist who answered. That choice produced 491 classified pickups, compared with 480 expected after removing the two narrative-only logs: a 2.3% difference. We retained the classifier result because it consistently treats every human answer as a pickup.

• It does not measure inbound customer calls. A business may treat a known customer or local number differently from an unknown cold caller.
• It does not measure missed revenue or lost bookings. No revenue outcome was attached to these calls.
• It does not prove Praxum product performance. This study observed trade-business reachability; it was not a product trial.
• It does not establish market size. The sample came from Praxum's calling lists, not a random census of every UK trade business.
• It does not support tiny trade comparisons. HVAC, drainage and combined plumbing-and-heating samples were below 40 dials and are not published as rates.

These limits are part of the result. They stop a useful reachability study from turning into a claim it cannot support.

Your inbound phone records are more useful for your business than any industry average. Pull at least 30 days of call data and separate the stages instead of counting only voicemail messages.

1. Count total inbound calls, answered calls, unanswered calls, busy calls and calls received while the phone was unreachable.
2. Separate first-time enquiries from existing customers and supplier calls where your system allows it.
3. Check how many unanswered callers reached voicemail and how many left no message.
4. Measure how long it took to respond and whether the enquiry ended in a booking, callback, decline or no contact.
5. Test your own number during no-answer, busy and no-signal conditions so you know where each call actually lands.

For a practical setup checklist, read how to stop missing calls in a plumbing business. To model your own assumptions rather than borrow ours, use the missed-call cost calculator.