Compare your performance to your peers using anonymized insights captured by Invoca's AI from over 70 million phone calls and 600 million minutes of conversations across 10 industries. Whether you're a CMO maximizing digital marketing ROI, a sales leader working to convert more callers, or a CX professional focused on the buyer experience, these benchmarks give you a baseline to measure against.

Be sure to try the interactive calculator ↓ at the end of this report to see how even small increases in your call conversion performance can move revenue.

At a glance

Research Highlights

Here's a snapshot of the business services benchmarks. See anything that surprises you? Keep reading to see how the numbers break down across channels.

56%

of callers to business services companies speak with a person

38%

of calls from digital marketing are leads

44%

of those leads convert on the call

75%

of business services companies don't ask leads to buy or book a meeting

Section 01

Call Answer Rates

When a prospect has spent weeks evaluating vendors finally calls to talk through pricing or book a demo, they're ready to move forward. The marketing did its job and got the phone to ring. If that call goes unanswered, you've wasted the marketing budget that got that phone to ring, and you've likely lost a customer to a competitor that actually answered.

56%

of callers to business services companies speak with a person

Across business services, 56% of calls are answered by a person. For calls lasting longer than 15 seconds — which filters out misdials and quick hangups — the answer rate is 66%. For calls over 30 seconds, it's 71%. Those thresholds provide a clearer picture of how well companies connect with callers who are genuinely trying to reach them.

56%

All Inbound Calls

66%

Calls Over 15 Seconds

71%

Calls Over 30 Seconds

Use these as your baseline. If your answer rates fall significantly below them, that gap points to revenue leakage due to routing, process, or staffing issues in the sales teams and contact centers that field the calls.

Tactics to Improve Call Answer Rates

If your answer rates trail the benchmark, these four moves help close the gap.

1
Deploy AI agents to engage leads 24/7
AI-powered voice and SMS agents can engage callers around the clock, so no lead goes unanswered, even after hours or during peak volume. When a caller can't reach a person, an AI agent can qualify their intent, answer questions, schedule a callback, or book an appointment via text. This is the single biggest lever for improving answer rates and speed-to-lead.
2
Use missed call data to inform staffing
Identify the specific days and times when missed calls spike, then compare those windows against call volume to pinpoint understaffing. Adjust schedules and resources so your team is available when callers need them most.
3
Pause ads when you're closed
If your business can't assist callers during off-hours, consider pausing paid campaigns that drive high call volumes during those windows. There's no reason to pay for calls that can't be answered, unless you have an AI agent handling them.
4
Identify site issues causing unnecessary calls
Some calls happen because your website didn't provide the information people needed. Look for patterns, such as if callers are frequently asking questions that should be answered on your site, fix the content or form experience. Fewer unnecessary calls mean your team can focus on the ones that matter.

Section 02

Phone Lead and Conversion Rates

Knowing which calls are real sales opportunities is how you connect marketing spend to revenue. Across business services, 38% of calls answered by a person are leads, and 44% of those leads convert on the call.

38%

of answered calls are leads

44%

of leads convert on the call

For marketing leaders, this is the foundation for calculating true campaign performance and return on ad spend. For sales and CX leaders, it sets the baseline for how effectively your team turns phone leads into meetings and deals and where coaching pays off.

Phone lead and conversion rates by marketing channel

Looking at lead and conversion rates by channel shows where your spend is actually producing revenue, and whether a channel is better at driving top-of-funnel leads or bottom-of-funnel conversions.

Answered calls that are leads

Leads that convert

A note on volume: percentages alone don't tell the full story

Paid search drives the highest volume of calls, leads, and conversions of any paid channel. Channel efficiency matters, but so does scale.

New data

What the data shows about ChatGPT and generative AI search

This is the first year there was enough data to measure calls driven by generative AI search, and the business services numbers stand out.

ChatGPT-referred calls have the highest phone lead rate of any channel at 43% — about three points above the next channel. And conversion holds up too, at 47%, near the top of the channel mix.

But there's a catch. The total volume of calls attributable to generative AI is still very low, with no measurable volume from LLMs other than ChatGPT. This is a signal worth watching closely, not a channel to redirect significant budget toward — yet. For now, the bulk of your phone leads and conversions still come from proven, high-volume channels like paid search and Google Business Profiles.

Tactics to Improve Phone Lead and Conversion Rates

If your lead rates trail the benchmark, your paid media may not be driving the right calls. If conversion rates trail, your sales team may not be saying the right things to move callers toward a meeting or a deal. Four ways to close those gaps.

1
Shift ad budget to what's really working
Use phone lead and conversion data to evaluate which channels, campaigns, and keywords are driving the best return. Then reallocate budget from underperformers to the investments that are actually producing revenue.
2
Pass call data to ad platforms for better auto-bidding
Feed phone lead and conversion data back into your ad platforms to fuel smarter automated bidding and audience targeting. This gives the algorithms real business outcomes to optimize against.
3
Use call data to improve ad targeting and optimization
Retarget leads that didn't convert on the call and suppress callers who already converted or called for non-sales reasons. And use your highest-value calls to build lookalike audiences that find more prospects like your best customers. Also, use "voice of the customer" data from calls to optimize everything from ad copy to landing pages, deflecting low-value inquiries and improving conversion rates.
4
Use AI agents to convert more leads
AI-powered voice and SMS agents can help you convert more leads after hours, during peak times, and with consumers who prefer engaging with an automated agent. AI agents can qualify lead intent, schedule appointments and callbacks, or speed up routing to human agents for high-intent leads.

Section 03

Google Ads Paid Search Performance

Google Ads remains the most important digital advertising channel for driving phone-based conversions in business services. Even small improvements to your phone lead and conversion rates from search ads can move business results more than any other paid channel.

Google Ads paid search performance

39%

Answered calls that are leads

44%

Leads that convert on the call

Tactics to Improve Phone Lead Rates and ROAS from Google Ads

If your Google Ads paid search results lag behind others in your industry, consider these strategies to improve efficiency and increase ROAS.

1
Shift spend to the keywords driving the most valuable calls
Identify which keywords generate qualified phone leads and conversions, then reallocate budget from underperforming terms to those high-value terms.
2
Use phone lead and conversion data to fuel Smart Bidding and Performance Max
Feed call outcome data into Google's automated bidding algorithms so they optimize for calls that actually turn into appointments or sales.
3
Retarget phone leads that didn't convert
Build audience segments from callers who were leads but didn't convert. These in-market audiences are often your most valuable.
4
Suppress non-lead and converted calls from seeing ads
Stop spending money showing ads to people who've already converted or who called for non-sales reasons. This alone can dramatically reduce wasted ad spend.
5
Add your most valuable calls to lookalike campaigns
Create lookalike audiences based on your highest-value callers to find more prospects with similar characteristics and behaviors.

Section 04

Call Handling Performance

Answering the call is step one. Whether a lead becomes a deal comes down to how your sales team or contact center staff engage the prospect, understand what they need, and guide them toward a decision.

Our analysis evaluated how often business services companies correctly handle phone leads across six key call handling metrics.

Tactics to Improve Call Handling Performance

If your metrics fall below your industry benchmarks — or if you don't have this level of insight into how calls are being handled — here are four strategies to drive improvements.

1
Use AI to score call handling performance
Implement AI-powered call scoring to get objective analytics on 100% of calls. With AI scoring, you can measure agent performance against key metrics at scale and spot trends you'd otherwise miss.
2
Qualify and route leads with an AI voice agent
An AI voice agent can qualify callers and route them to the right person before a human agent picks up. This means your sales team spends less time on non-leads, and high-intent callers get connected quickly to the agent or location best equipped to convert them.
3
Pass caller data to agents before the conversation starts
Arm your agents with context from the caller's digital journey, such as which ad they clicked, which pages they visited, and what they searched for. When agents know why someone is calling before they say hello, conversations are more relevant and close rates go up.
4
Refine talk tracks based on what actually works
Use call scoring data to correlate specific agent behaviors with call outcomes. What are your top converters doing differently? Identify patterns, update your talk tracks, and provide targeted coaching to agents who need it, using specific call examples to illustrate what great looks like.

What's next

Turning These Insights Into Action

This benchmark data shows how business services companies are performing at answering calls, converting leads, and handling conversations. It's a useful starting point for figuring out where you stand and where to focus.

But benchmarking only works if you have the data to compare against, and that's where most companies hit a wall. Without visibility into which calls are leads, which channels drive them, how well your team converts them, and what's actually happening in the conversations, you're optimizing in the dark.

Companies that connect their digital, conversation, and transaction data have a real advantage. They can see the full journey from ad click to phone call to closed deal, and use that picture to make better decisions across marketing, sales, and operations.

The good news: small improvements compound fast. If your results align with the benchmarks here, lifting your answer rate, lead rate, and conversion rate by just five percentage points each would drive roughly 35% more conversions from the same call volume.

~35%

more conversions from the same call volume — if you improve your answer rate, lead rate, and conversion rate by just five percentage points each

Want to see what that looks like for your business? Try the calculator below.

Interactive tool

What Would Converting More Calls Mean for Your Revenue?

You're already driving the demand. Use this calculator to see how much additional revenue you could capture by converting more of the leads you're getting today.

Model your own improvement

Plug in your current call volume, answer rate, lead rate, and conversion rate to see the revenue impact of closing the gap to the business services benchmark.

Methodology

How this report was built

This report focuses on the business services industry, drawing on anonymized data from phone calls tracked and analyzed by the Invoca platform, within a broader dataset of over 70 million calls and 600 million minutes of conversation spanning 10 industries and 7 marketing channels. All figures are averages across the Invoca customer base.