In home services, the call center prints or burns money. Everything else is commentary.

Speed to lead isn’t a “nice to have”. MIT’s work on lead response showed qualification odds fall off a cliff when you wait, including a 21x drop comparing 5 minutes vs 30 minutes.
So when the team celebrates “pipeline” while leads sit in a queue, that’s not marketing underperforming. That’s revenue being politely ignored.

The usual organisational comedy
Marketing owns spend
Nobody owns answer rate, speed to lead, booking discipline
Then everyone acts surprised when CAC goes up

Meanwhile, average call answer rates are mediocre even across industries, around 61% live answer in Invoca’s benchmark.
And home services is one of the few worlds where the phone still decides the outcome. Recent home services call performance benchmarks show lead conversion rates can be materially higher when the contact centre is actually run like a sales function.
Every missed call has a real cost, and “we’ll call them back” is how you fund your competitor’s next quarter.

The fix is boring, which is why it works
One funnel owner with authority across marketing, phones, scheduling
Daily scorecard: speed to lead, answer rate, booking rate, abandonment, show rate
QA that is ruthless about booking discipline, not “customer service vibes”
Staffing model tied to forecast, not hope and overtime

Stop treating phones like admin. The call centre is the growth team, whether you admit it or not.