A text that arrives seconds after an unanswered call is the highest-converting message most contractors will ever send, and most of them send the wrong one. The default wording that ships with the software is written to be safe for every industry, which makes it sound like it came from no one.
What the text is actually for
Not to apologise. To restart the conversation on a channel where the person will reply.
The caller is in a specific state: they have your number on screen, they have an unsolved problem, and they are about to dial the next company. You have perhaps two minutes of relevance. The message has one job, which is to get a reply — not to book, not to explain your services, not to promote anything.
That framing kills most of what people put in these messages. Business hours, a link to your website, a list of services: all of it competes with the reply.
The four rules
- Name the business in the first four words. An unknown number sending "Sorry we missed you!" reads as spam and gets deleted before it is finished.
- Under twenty-five words. Long texts from unknown numbers do not get read. Anything you cut was competing with the reply.
- Ask exactly one question, and make it specific. "How can we help?" is answerable with nothing. "What's going on with it?" gets a description.
- Write it the way you talk. Read it aloud. If you would not say it stood next to your van, rewrite it.
Templates you can paste
Swap the business name and the trade. Keep the length.
General service call
This is Dave at Ridgeline Plumbing — sorry I missed your call, I'm on a job. What's going on?
After hours
Ridgeline Plumbing here, sorry we missed you. If it's an emergency, reply EMERGENCY and I'll call you back now.
Giving an emergency an explicit keyword does two things: it lets a genuine emergency jump the queue, and it stops a routine caller from claiming one, because the word makes the claim feel specific.
Weather event, when volume is genuinely overwhelming
Ridgeline Roofing — sorry, phones are swamped after the storm. Reply with your address and I'll get you on the list today.
Honesty about being overwhelmed outperforms pretending you are not. The caller has already failed to reach three roofers and knows exactly what is happening.
Quoted work
This is Dave at Ridgeline Electric, sorry I missed you. Are you after a quote? Tell me what you're looking at and I'll price it.
The line that must never be in it
"Please call us back during business hours."
That sentence takes the one asset you have — a person holding a phone, thinking about their problem right now — and asks them to reproduce that state at a time convenient for you. They will not. They will call someone else, and your text will have actively told them to stop trying.
The same applies to "leave a voicemail and we'll get back to you". If voicemail worked, the missed call would not have been a problem.
The second message
If there is no reply, send one more, several hours later or the next morning. One. It should reference the original call, not start fresh:
Following up on your call yesterday — still need someone to look at it?
Then stop. A third text to someone who has not replied twice is not persistence, it is the reason people block business numbers. If they needed you, they answered. If they did not, the goodwill you keep by leaving them alone is worth more than the job you were not going to get.