BeepBack Research

The NJ Plumber Phone Test

We called 133 New Jersey plumbing shops from a regular cell phone, during business hours. About 1 in 6 ever picked up.

In July 2026, our team spent two weekdays calling plumbing businesses across 33 towns in northern New Jersey. We weren’t mystery shoppers and this wasn’t a stunt. We were introducing ourselves, one call at a time, the old-fashioned way. What we accidentally ran was a field study of how often anyone picks up at all. Ours were sales calls, not emergencies, so read the answer rate as a floor on reachability rather than a simulation of a customer: a homeowner with water on the floor is not treated the same as a vendor, and 20 of the 23 who answered us hung up within seconds.

Very little has been published on this from the caller’s side. The stats that get passed around, “62% of missed calls never call back” and its cousins, trace back to nothing. So here are ours, with the full methodology. Every figure below is from our call log.

The numbers

And the details that don’t fit in a table:

• Most shops got two calls, hours apart: a late-morning attempt and an early-afternoon attempt. The second call usually rang out too.
• Where voicemail existed, we left messages. But two shops had voicemail boxes too full to accept a message, and one had never set voicemail up at all. A customer literally could not tell those businesses they wanted to hire them.
• Of the 23 people who did answer, 20 hung up within seconds. An unknown number calling midday reads as spam, even when it’s a real caller.

If you’re a homeowner, you already knew this

You’ve lived this experiment. Water heater dies, you search “plumber near me,” and you start dialing. The first number is disconnected. The second rings out. The third has a full mailbox. The fourth answers, and gets the job. Nobody calls back the shops that didn’t pick up. Why would they? The problem is urgent and the list is long.

If you own a shop, this is not about effort

The shops that didn’t answer weren’t slacking; they were working. We know because we talked to some of them. You can’t take a call from under a sink, in an attic, or elbow-deep in a sewer line. The person who answers every call at 11am is, almost by definition, not on a job at 11am.

That’s the trap of the trades: the better booked you are, the more unreachable you are, and the more of tomorrow’s work rings out to the next name on the list. Voicemail doesn’t catch it: our data says some boxes are full, some don’t exist, and honestly, callers with an emergency rarely leave messages when the next plumber might just answer. It’s getting worse, not better: modern phones increasingly screen and silence calls from numbers they don’t recognize, in both directions.

Run your own numbers: if your average job is worth a few hundred dollars and your line looks anything like the 133 we called, the phone is where the work goes missing, not the job site. Try the missed-call calculator →

Methodology, in full

• When: two weekdays in July 2026, between roughly 9:50 AM and 2:00 PM Eastern.
• Who we called: 133 plumbing businesses across 33 towns in northern New Jersey, drawn from public listings (directories, websites, review sites), business lines only.
• How: live human callers, no robocalls, no autodialers, and no text messages. Most shops received two attempts, spaced hours apart. Where voicemail was available, we left one.
• What we counted: a number as “dead” only when the carrier said so (disconnected / not in service); an “answer” as any human picking up, even for two seconds.
• Ethics: one shop asked not to be contacted again and was permanently removed from every list we hold, same day. All results here are aggregate and anonymized: this page names no business, and we’re not here to embarrass anyone. Methodology questions: hello@getbeepback.com.
• Honest limitations: one region, one trade, midday hours, a modest sample. We’d love to see someone run it bigger. This is only a guess, but we’d expect early-morning and evening numbers look a little better, and that other trades look about the same.

Why we did this (and what BeepBack is)

We build BeepBack: it texts your missed callers back in seconds, asks the few questions you’d ask (what the job is, how soon it has to happen, and where), and hands you a sorted, ready-to-call lead instead of a mystery missed-call notification. The customer feels heard within seconds; you reply when you’re out from under the sink. It’s $79 a month flat, no contract, built for exactly the shops in this study.

We ran a calling campaign to introduce it, and the campaign itself proved the point better than any pitch we wrote. The trades don’t have an interest problem or an effort problem. They have a phone problem.

See how BeepBack works → · What a missed call costs you → · All BeepBack research →

Common questions

How many plumbing businesses actually answer their phone?

In our July 2026 field test of 133 New Jersey plumbing shops, called during business hours (most twice), a person answered at about 1 in 6 shops. Of the phone numbers that worked at all, about 1 in 4 were ever answered by a human.

How many business phone listings are dead or wrong?

In the same test, 32 of 133 published phone numbers, about 1 in 4, were disconnected, out of service, or otherwise dead.

Is the “62% of missed calls never call back” statistic real?

We couldn’t trace it to any real study, so we don’t use it. This page exists because we wanted numbers with a methodology behind them.

What happens when a customer’s call goes unanswered?

In urgent trades like plumbing, callers typically move to the next listing rather than leave a voicemail; two shops in our test had voicemail boxes too full to accept messages at all.