Missed-Call Text-Back: Stop Losing Jobs to Unanswered Calls

How to enable automatic SMS replies when a call goes unanswered, configure your forward number and ring timeout, and turn every missed call into a CRM lead.

What missed-call text-back does

When somebody calls your business number and you do not pick up — busy, after hours, driving, on a job — DunaHub sends them an SMS from your number within seconds. A lead is created in your CRM with the caller's phone and the call log, ready to follow up from the unified inbox.

The feature itself is free on every plan. Only the SMS is metered ($9 per 100 credits), same as the rest of the SMS system.

Enable missed-call text-back

  1. Open Settings → Phone in your dashboard.
  2. Toggle Enable missed-call text-back on.
  3. Configure the four fields below.
  4. Click Save.

Configure the four fields

Forward number

The cell phone or alternative line that incoming calls forward to. When this line does not pick up within the ring timeout, the missed-call text-back triggers.

If you have multiple people answering calls, set the forward number to a hunting group or your VoIP routing — anything that resolves to "somebody picked up" or "nobody picked up".

Ring timeout

How long the business number rings before a call is considered missed. Configurable between 10 and 60 seconds. Most contractors set this between 20 and 25 seconds — long enough that you can answer if you are near the phone, short enough that the caller does not give up before the text fires.

Text-back message

The SMS sent to the caller when a call is missed. Keep it short, friendly, and personal — it lands on the caller's phone within seconds of them hanging up.

Example:

"Sorry we missed you! This is Mike from Acme HVAC. Reply here and I'll get back to you in a few minutes."

You can include placeholders like the caller's name if you keep variables shown in the editor. The message is the same for every caller, regardless of whether the call was busy, missed, or no-answer.

Sending number

The SMS is sent from your business number — the same one the caller just dialed. To the caller it looks like a normal text from your shop, not a third-party tool.

SMS credits

The text-back itself costs 1 SMS credit per message sent. Credits are prepaid ($9 per 100 credits) because each SMS has a real carrier cost — there is no way to make this free without us absorbing it for every account.

Most contractors miss 6–8 calls per week. At the average $1,200 value of a missed service call, recovering even one job per month pays for years of SMS credits.

How leads are created from missed calls

For every missed call:

  1. A lead is created in your CRM with the caller's phone number and the call timestamp.
  2. The call log is attached to the lead's timeline (so even calls you answered show up there alongside SMS, email, and WhatsApp).
  3. If the caller replies to the text-back, the reply lands as an SMS in the unified inbox, attached to the same lead.
  4. The lead enters the first stage of your default pipeline, ready to be triaged.

If the caller's phone number matches an existing lead, no duplicate is created — the call is logged on the existing lead.

Call logs

All inbound and outbound calls log to the lead's timeline:

  • Inbound: missed, answered, voicemail
  • Outbound: dialed, connected, no-answer
  • Duration and timestamp for each

This means you have a unified history per customer that includes calls and messages, instead of calls living separately from texts and email.

What is not included

  • Voicemail transcription is not part of the missed-call text-back feature (it's a separate add-on for accounts with voicemail-to-email enabled).
  • Outbound cold calling and dialer features are not part of this integration.