The phone rings while you have a wet dog on the table and both hands in a coat.
You cannot answer it. By the time you can, the caller has rung the salon down the road, and you will never know they existed. That is the problem, and it is real. What follows is the part that usually gets skipped.
Where we stand. We make booking software and a missed-call add-on, so we have an interest in you fixing this a particular way. The counting exercise below works regardless of what you buy afterwards, including nothing.
Count them first
For two weeks, log every call you did not answer. A notes app is fine. Against each one, write what they wanted once you found out, and sort it into one of three buckets.
Bookable. They wanted an appointment. Do you have a Saturday, can I get Buddy in before the 14th, can I move Thursday.
Answerable. A question with a fixed answer. What do you charge for a cocker spaniel, do you do cats, where do I park, do you take Amex.
A conversation. Something that needed a human. A complaint, a dog that is unwell, a quote for a matted rescue nobody has seen, a first-time owner who needs talking through it.
Most pet businesses that do this are surprised by the split. The third bucket is usually small.
That matters because every product sold to fix missed calls is priced as though every call is in bucket three.
Fix them in cost order
Bookable calls: a booking page, at no per-call cost
This is the biggest bucket and the cheapest fix, and it is the one most businesses do last.
A caller asking whether you have a Saturday is trying to read your diary out loud through you. Give them the diary. They see real availability, they pick a slot, it lands in your calendar with the pet, the service and the notes attached, and nobody was interrupted.
Over half of appointments on Petboost are booked by the customer themselves. Around 70% of those arrive outside opening hours, which is the detail that reframes the whole problem: those are not calls you missed. They are calls that were never made, at an hour when no answering service is on your cheapest plan and no employee is awake.
There is no per-call charge on a booking that never became a call.
Answerable calls: publish the answer where they look
Prices, breeds you do and do not take, parking, what is included in a full groom, your cancellation terms. Put them on the page people land on before they ring.
This feels too obvious to be worth doing. It is the single highest-return hour in this entire post, because every one of these calls is the same call, and you have answered it four hundred times.
The ones that still ring out: missed call text back
An automatic text the moment you miss a call. "Sorry we missed you, we are on the floor until 4. Here is the booking page, or reply here and we will call back."
There are two ways to get one. Many mobile carriers and VoIP providers can send an automatic text to a missed call, and it is often included in your plan. Look for "auto reply to missed call" or "SMS auto-responder".
Or put the calls on your Petboost number with the Call Catcher Booster, an add-on you switch on yourself. Calls ring your own phone, and the caller only ever sees your Petboost number. A call you can't take, or any call outside your opening hours, hears your greeting and a short menu. Press 1 and Petboost texts your booking link, and for a past client the link opens with their pet and last service already chosen. Press 2 and they leave a voicemail, which lands in their conversation in Messages with a text to your phone. No AI answers your phone. It needs the Communications Booster, and call minutes are included each month. One recovered call, or one booking link sent, a month pays for the whole $19.
Then there is the half after that. Two-way SMS from an Australian number means the reply lands in your inbox instead of a voicemail you have to listen to in order, and you answer five of them at once between dogs. Every Business plan includes an SMS allowance, and top-ups run from $15 for 100 to $79 for 1,000 because we buy at wholesale carrier rates, so the texts that catch a missed call are not the expensive part. Credits count per carrier segment, so keep them short. The caller has heard something inside a minute, which is usually before they have rung anybody else, and that is the whole game.
Bucket three: now decide what to buy
Whatever is left is the volume you should be pricing an answering service or an AI receptionist against. It is a much smaller number than the one you started with, and it changes which product is worth it. The published Australian prices are here.
What I would not do
Do not buy an AI receptionist to answer bucket one. You would be paying per message for a conversation whose entire content is reading out a diary the customer could have read themselves. If a vendor meters per message, a single booking is several of them.
Do not put a mobile number on the site and hope. It moves the interruption, it does not remove it, and now it follows you home.
Do not switch everything on at once. Publish the prices this week. Turn on the booking page. Live with it for a month and recount. The bucket three number you get then is the real one.
The bit nobody tells you
Fixing this properly makes the phone quieter, and a quiet phone feels like a slow week.
It is not. It is the same work arriving through a door that does not interrupt you. The first time you notice it, check the calendar rather than the call log, because the call log is now measuring the wrong thing.
See how a booking arrives without a call · See the Call Catcher Booster · See two-way SMS · Start a free trial