What's the real cost of a missed termite inspection call?

For Pest Control

A missed termite inspection call is one of the more expensive missed opportunities in pest control, because the inspection itself, while sometimes offered free or at a low fee to generate the lead, is the entry point to a much larger job. If the inspection confirms activity, the resulting treatment commonly runs $1,200 to $2,000 for a bait and monitoring system like Sentricon, or $1,200 to $2,500 for whole-structure fumigation or tenting depending on the property size, plus in many cases an ongoing annual monitoring contract worth another $300 to $400 a year after that. A missed call does not just cost you that one job; it often costs you the multi-year monitoring relationship that comes with it, since termite contracts frequently renew annually for as long as the homeowner stays in the house. Termite calls are also disproportionately time-sensitive: someone who spots swarmers or mud tubes wants an inspection scheduled quickly, and a real estate transaction tied to a WDI report has a hard closing deadline, so a caller who reaches voicemail is more likely to immediately call a competitor than wait for a callback, unlike a lower-urgency request like a routine ant treatment. Across a spring swarm season, even a handful of missed termite calls, say 3 to 5 over a couple of months, can represent $4,000 to $10,000 in lost treatment revenue plus the recurring monitoring contracts attached to them. Against that, a $99 a month Premium plan that answers every termite call around the clock is a rounding error by comparison.