Search this and you get templates. Dozens of them, all variations on "Hi, sorry we missed your call, how can we help?" The template is the easy part, and it is not what decides whether this works. Two things decide that: which missed calls you send a text to, and whether the text moves the job forward or hands the work back to the caller.
Some missed calls should not get a text
An automatic reply fires on a trigger, and the trigger is dumber than you are. Before you turn it on, know what it will catch.
- Callers who cannot receive a text. A call from a landline that has not been text enabled, or from a withheld number, produces nothing. The message is logged as sent on your side, which is worse than no message, because you stop chasing a caller who never heard from you.
- Repeat dialers. Someone who rings three times in a row gets three identical apologies unless the system suppresses repeats inside a window. This is the complaint owners actually get, and it is a setting rather than a wording problem. Find that setting before you launch.
- Existing customers mid-job. "How can we help?" sent to a person whose boiler you are already booked to fix reads as not knowing who they are. If the system can check the number against your customer list, the text for a known number should say something different, or nothing.
- Spam and spoofed traffic. Texting every unknown number that rang you means texting numbers that were faked to ring you. It costs money and it annoys strangers.
What is left after those exclusions is the call this tool is for: an unknown number, ringing once, during or just after your working day, from a mobile.
Make the text ask the question you need answered
The generic template is polite and useless. It acknowledges the call and then puts the next move back on the caller, who is the busier of the two of you at that moment.
The better shape is to ask the one thing you would have asked if you had picked up. For a trade, that is the address and what has failed. For a clinic, that is whether this is a new patient. For anyone who quotes work, it is the detail that decides whether the job is worth driving to. A caller who answers that question has started the booking, and you can reply with a time instead of a question.
Our missed call text back generator writes a version of this for your business, and the useful thing to do with its output is cut it down and add your qualifying question.
Send it immediately, because waiting buys nothing
The caller who rang you is working down a list. They have your competitors' numbers open in the same search results, and they will keep dialing until a human answers. A text that lands while the phone is still in their hand reaches an open decision. The same text an hour later reaches a decision somebody else already closed.
There is no case for a deliberate delay. The only reason to introduce one is to give yourself a chance to call back first, and if you were able to call back you would not have missed the call.
It creates an obligation, so read the inbox
This is the part the product pages skip. An automatic text invites a reply, and a reply that nobody reads is a worse outcome than the original missed call. The caller now believes they have reached you. They will wait instead of calling the next business, and then they will be annoyed rather than merely unlucky.
So before switching it on, decide who watches that thread and on what days. If the answer is nobody after six in the evening, say so in the text and give a time, the way a good after hours voicemail greeting does. A promise of a callback tomorrow morning that you keep beats an open-ended "we will get back to you" that you do not.
Also treat a reply asking you to stop as binding, and check that your provider honours it automatically rather than relying on someone noticing.
Watch replies, not sends
The dashboard will show you messages sent, and that number will look healthy immediately because it is just a count of your missed calls. It tells you nothing. The figures worth reading are how many of those texts got a reply, and how many of those conversations ended in a booking.
If sends are high and replies are near zero, the problem is usually the text asking nothing, or the trigger catching the calls listed at the top of this page. If replies are healthy and bookings are not, the problem is downstream of the text and no amount of rewriting it will help.
Messages are metered per message on our plans rather than bundled into an unlimited bucket, so see the plans for the current allowances. That matters here mostly because a trigger that fires on spam and repeat dialers spends the allowance on people who were never going to book.
If you are missing calls all day, this is the wrong fix
A text back is recovery, not coverage. It is the right tool when the misses are occasional and the callers are reachable. If the phone is going unanswered through the whole working day, you are automating an apology instead of fixing the thing generating it, and the place to start is sorting your own misses by hour to see what shape the problem actually has.