Give your hours, whether you are taking bookings and how to order, inside about 20 seconds, because the first of two measured hang-up spikes lands in the opening seconds of a recording and the second at about 60 seconds. Skai Solutions has put the full script below, along with what the message cannot fix and four ways to stop needing it, cheapest first.
The honest answer is that nobody has published a reliable restaurant figure, and the ones circulating are folklore. What does exist is measured data from adjacent industries and from call centres, and it is enough to size the problem.
The Marchex Institute analysed 5.8 million calls to 13 hotel brands and found a 14% failed call rate, calls that were never answered or were abandoned while waiting, with 5% never answered at all. That is hotels, and the data is from 2017, so treat it as the shape of the problem rather than your number. Nobody has published the equivalent for Australian or New Zealand restaurants.
The number that is worth more to you is your own. Ring your own venue at 6.20pm on a Friday from a phone your staff do not recognise, and count the rings. Do it three Fridays running. That measurement takes ten minutes and beats every statistic on this page.
The strongest evidence on hang-ups is a full year census of over 1,200,000 calls published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association in 2005 by Brown, Gans, Mandelbaum and colleagues. Not a survey, every call.
Three findings matter for a voicemail greeting. About 20% of callers who asked for service abandoned before they got it. Mean caller patience was 446 seconds, roughly 7.4 minutes, which is far longer than the industry folklore claims. And the hazard analysis found two distinct hang-up spikes: one in the first few seconds as the recorded message begins, and a second at about 60 seconds, when the message repeats.
Brown, Gans, Mandelbaum et al., "Statistical Analysis of a Telephone Call Center: A Queueing-Science Perspective", Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol 100 No 469, 2005.
So the design rule writes itself. The opening seconds are where you lose people, which means the first thing out of the speaker has to be information, not manners. "Thank you for calling, your call is important to us, we are currently unable to take your call" spends the entire danger window saying nothing. And because the second spike lands at about 60 seconds, a message longer than about 25 seconds is working against you.
Four things, in this order: who you are, when you are open, what the caller can do right now, and how to leave something you will actually action. Here is a script you can read straight into the handset.
"You've reached Rossi's on Lygon Street. We're open Tuesday to Sunday, 5pm to 10pm, and closed Mondays. To book a table or order takeaway, go to rossis dot com dot au, or leave your name, your number and what you need after the tone and we'll call you back before 4pm tomorrow. Thanks."
That is about 22 seconds read at a normal pace. Notice what is not in it. No hold music, no "your call is important to us", no menu of options, no apology. Notice what is: the two facts every caller wants, one clear alternative, and a promise with a time on it.
Three specifics worth getting right.
And one thing to leave out entirely: do not read your menu, your address, your parking arrangements and your dietary policy into a voicemail. Nobody is writing that down at 6.20pm.
Fifteen minutes, your menu, your busiest service. Bring the hardest call you get.
Book a Free DemoA good greeting is damage control. These four actually reduce the number of calls that reach it, in order of what they cost.
1. Change the roster, not the technology. Free. Most missed calls cluster in a 90 minute window. Look at when yours land and give one person the phone for that window as their actual job, not as something they do between tables. This costs nothing except accepting that the phone is a job.
2. Put the answers where people look first. Free. A large share of calls are hours, address, parking and "are you open on Monday". Google Business Profile hours, a booking link in your Instagram bio and an accurate website header remove those calls entirely. This is the highest return work on the list and almost nobody finishes it.
3. A phone system with an auto attendant. About A$20 to A$35 per user per month. Independent Australian business communications guide Need to Know Comms puts the standard tier, which adds auto attendant, ring groups, transfer and hold music, at A$20 to A$35 per user per month as at August 2026, with basic tiers from A$8. That routes calls better. It does not answer them.
4. A person, or an AI phone agent. Rostering someone specifically to cover 5pm to 9pm, five nights, is 80 hours a month, which at the Restaurant Award Level 1 casual rate of A$33.05 an hour from 1 July 2026 is A$2,644 before superannuation and penalties. That is Skai Solutions' own arithmetic on the award figures, shown so you can change the hours. What an AI phone agent costs instead is on the Skai Solutions pricing page, and what an AI receptionist costs across the market compares the pricing models without naming vendors.
Voicemail is not only a busy service problem. It is where your cancellations land, and cancellations are time critical in a way enquiries are not. The Resos No-Show Index 2026, which measured 3,768,761 reservations at 2,417 restaurants over the year to 31 July 2026, found that 56% of cancellations arrived within 24 hours of the booking or after it had already started, and 7.1% landed after the start time. Australia's recorded no-show rate in that dataset was 1.41%, from 251,804 reservations at 213 Australian restaurants.
Resos No-Show Index 2026, published 19 August 2026. This is a recorded rate, so staff have to mark the no-show and the true rate will be higher. New Zealand did not meet the publication threshold, so there is no New Zealand figure here.
A cancellation sitting unheard on a machine overnight is a table you could have resold. That is the case for someone or something picking up out of hours, and it is worked through properly on the Skai Solutions page about restaurant no-shows.
If you have fixed the roster, published the answers, upgraded the system and still lose calls at service, the problem is not the phone. It is that the number of simultaneous callers at 6.20pm exceeds the number of hands you have, and no greeting solves arithmetic. At that point the choice is to accept the loss, to pay for a person whose only job is the handset, or to have something answer every call at once. Skai Solutions answers all of them, takes orders straight into your POS, handles hours and booking questions without interrupting the floor, and transfers to your team when a caller genuinely needs a person. You keep your existing number, setup takes five days, and there is no new hardware.
If you would rather train it out than buy it out, the Skai Solutions guide to how to answer the phone at a restaurant is the manual version, and whether an AI receptionist actually works covers what the technology does badly as well as what it does well.
If your venue takes almost every booking online and gets four calls a week, a decent 20 second greeting is the whole answer and anything more is a waste of money. Fix the greeting, put your hours on Google, and get back to work. The venues where this becomes a real cost are the ones doing volume on the handset between 5.30pm and 8pm, which is a specific kind of business rather than all of them.
About 20 to 25 seconds. Call centre data shows two hang-up spikes, one in the opening seconds of a recording and a second at about 60 seconds when the message repeats, so anything past about 25 seconds is working against you.
Your venue name and your opening hours, including the day you are closed. A large share of calls to an unanswered restaurant phone are people checking whether you are open, and answering that in the first sentence sends them away satisfied.
Neither is a substitute for answering. If you use a greeting, lead with information rather than an apology, because the first measured hang-up spike happens in the opening seconds while a recording is still being polite.
Some do, and cancellations in particular arrive late. Measured booking data shows 56% of cancellations land within 24 hours of the booking or after it has started, so an unchecked machine overnight is a table you could have resold.
More: all Skai Solutions guides and what an AI receptionist is and does.