Your Funeral Home Is a Call Center | Will de Michaelis (PartingPro) #72
How many calls did your funeral home truly miss last month?
Not calls that reached voicemail and received a return call later. Calls that rang out, disconnected, and sent a family somewhere else.
In this episode of the Direct Cremation Podcast, host Will de Michaelis challenges funeral home owners to rethink phone coverage. His central point is simple: every funeral home operates like a small call center, yet most firms do not staff their phones using call-center data.
At an average case value of $1,200, missing only two at-need calls each month could send nearly $30,000 in annual revenue to a competitor. More importantly, it can leave a family without support during one of the hardest moments of their life.
Phone Coverage Is a Math Problem
Many funeral homes build schedules around habit. One person handles overnight calls. Everyone helps during office hours. Lunch happens at noon because noon feels quiet.
But calls do not arrive neatly. A funeral home may receive no calls for 40 minutes, followed by three calls in 90 seconds. That “clumping” makes simple averages misleading.
Will introduces Erlang C, a staffing formula used by call centers, airlines, and emergency dispatch operations. The formula uses two primary inputs:
- Calls received per hour
- Average time spent handling each call
It then estimates how many people must answer phones to meet a chosen service-level target. A common benchmark is 80/20: answering 80% of calls within 20 seconds.
This gives funeral home management teams something more useful than a general feeling that the phones seem busy. It creates an hour-by-hour staffing plan based on actual demand.
Start With 90 Days of Call Records
Before adjusting schedules, funeral homes need reliable data. Will recommends requesting a Call Detail Records (CDR) export, from the phone carrier.
The export should cover at least 90 days and arrive in CSV format. A single month may include holidays, seasonal changes, or unusual spikes. Three months provides a stronger baseline.
A typical export includes:
- Incoming, outgoing, and internal calls
- Date and time stamps
- Call duration
- Calling and dialed numbers
- Outcomes such as answered, abandoned, voicemail, or no answer
The spreadsheet may look overwhelming, but it contains a record of when families call, how long conversations last, and where calls disappear.
Clean the Data Before Trusting It
Raw phone data can mislead you. In the episode’s sample file, roughly 6% of the records did not represent genuine phone conversations.
The problems included faxes counted as incoming calls, carrier network tests, and zero-second “connected” calls caused by line glitches. Leaving those records in the dataset creates faulty staffing recommendations.
Zero-second connections, for example, lower the calculated average handle time. The model may then suggest fewer people than the funeral home actually needs—the worst direction for the estimate to miss.
The workbook featured in the episode automatically flags multiple data-quality issues. Once cleaned, the demo dataset dropped from 4,257 records to 4,001 real calls.
This is a practical example of funeral tech supporting better decisions. Even the best funeral home software, cremation software, funeral management system, or focused spreadsheet depends on clean data—not a polished dashboard built on bad information.
The Phones Do Not Take Lunch
The hour-by-hour results exposed a common scheduling mistake.
Call volume climbed through the morning and peaked around 11 a.m. at slightly more than five calls per hour. At noon, traffic barely declined. It remained near four calls per hour and climbed again by 2 p.m.
Many funeral homes schedule lunch coverage as though noon were automatically quiet. The data showed the opposite. When the front office takes lunch together, the firm may create a coverage gap during one of its busiest periods.
The analysis also challenged assumptions about call length. Owners often picture lengthy first calls or cremation arrangements, but many conversations involve quick questions about death certificates, service times, or family arrival. In the sample, the blended average lasted only 1.6 minutes, or about 96 seconds.
Better Data Creates Better Family Care
Strong phone coverage protects revenue, but it also improves the family experience from the first point of contact.
Funeral arranging software, a funeral director app, and online funeral arrangements can streamline the next steps after a family connects with your firm. None of those tools can help when nobody answers the original call.
The takeaway is clear: stop guessing. Pull 90 days of call records, remove misleading entries, study demand by hour, and build schedules around the moments when families actually call.
Your funeral home may be a small call center—but every call carries far more weight than an ordinary customer-service inquiry.
Learn more and watch the full episode! 🎧 Your Funeral Home Is a Call Center | Will de Michaelis (PartingPro) #72