of 41,293 calls to legal and home-service businesses were answered on the first try (Expertise.com, September 2020 to January 2021).
Expertise.comFort Collins answer-rate report · October 2026
We rang 60 Fort Collins businesses in business hours. A person picked up at 32.
The other 28 callers got a phone menu, a recording, a silent line, or a phone that rang until it gave up. A customer who meets one of those doesn’t wait to find out why. They try the next name.
Free. A person rings your line once, like a customer would, and emails you what they heard.
What happened when the phone rang
Each business’s own published number, rung once. What the caller heard first:
- 3253%
A person picked up
“Thank you for calling…”, a name, a question.
- 610%
The line opened and nobody spoke
Ringing, then silence, or a line that dropped at once.
- 47%
It rang out
No answer and no voicemail box.
- 23%
A recording or voicemail
A greeting, then the tone.
By hour
A person picked up
- 10 a.m.5 of 9
- 11 a.m.7 of 12
- Noon4 of 12
- 1 p.m.8 of 12
- 2 p.m.4 of 7
- 3 p.m.4 of 8
The noon hour was the weakest: a person at 4 of 12. With about ten calls an hour, read it as a hint, not a pattern.
By kind of business
A person picked up
- Food and drink6 of 8
- Trades and home6 of 9
- Offices (law, tax, insurance)5 of 9
- Auto4 of 7
- Shops5 of 11
- Health, salons and care6 of 14
- Library and theatre0 of 2
Food counters and tradespeople picked up most. Clinics, salons and shops sent the most callers to a menu. Again, a handful of calls each.
One shop’s line, counted for a month
A Front Range auto repair shop whose phone Riley answers. October 1 to 26, 2026, from his line’s own call records.
- 75calls to his line
- 42were spamMore than half. Riley screened them out.
- 33were real customers3 were booked onto his calendar during the call.
If he answered every ring himself, more than half his pickups would be robocalls and sales pitches, and the 33 that mattered would arrive in among them, often while his hands were full.
What larger counts found
Our 32 of 60 sits inside what bigger studies report:
of calls to home-service businesses answered, in a vendor report drawn from about 70 million calls across its platform (Invoca, 2026).
Invocaof calls reached a live person in a study of 85 businesses (411 Locals, as summarized by JustCall).
JustCallYou will also see “62% of calls go unanswered” and “85% never call back.” We could not find a primary source for either, so we don’t use them.
Check your own business
Find out what your callers hear.
Tell us the number your customers call. A person from our team rings it once, at a time you won’t expect, the way a customer would, and emails you what they heard: who picked up, how many rings, what a caller gets when nobody can. Then, if you want, 20 minutes with Travis to talk it through.
Rather not wait?
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Two numbers only you know. Nothing is sent anywhere.
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How we counted
No calls were placed for this report. Every number on this page comes from calls we had already made or answered.
The 60 calls are Riley’s, our AI assistant’s. Between October 14 and 26 she rang the published line of businesses listed, unclaimed, on The Fort List, once each, to offer the business its free page. She rings only landlines and office phone systems, never a mobile number, and these calls all went out between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. on weekdays. One more call is left out because the number on that listing reached the city police switchboard.
We sorted each call by the first thing the line said, from the call’s own transcript, and checked the five calls with no transcript against the phone carrier’s record. A phone menu counts as “not a person” even when a person may sit behind it.
This is what we saw, not a town-wide statistic. Sixty calls is a small sample, and it isn’t a random one: only unclaimed listings, only landlines and office systems, in the alphabetical order the calls went out, one try each, at one time of day each. Read the hour and kind-of-business splits as hints.
The one-shop numbers are a client of ours, not named because he hasn’t said we may. They come from his line’s call records, with our own test calls taken out.
Counted 2026-10-27. Sample: 60 calls.