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Between October 23 and 26, 2026, Turnpike Tech built 105 research dossiers on real home-service shops for its own sales research. This page reports what we counted, how we counted it, and what the data does not support. Published October 26, 2026, by Turnpike Tech.
dossiers contain at least one verbatim customer complaint about an unanswered phone, an unreturned call, or being ghosted after contact.
Source: Turnpike Tech dossier audit, October 2026.
shops publish conflicting main phone numbers across their own website and listings. Only 59 of 105 had one consistent main line confirmed.
Source: Turnpike Tech dossier audit, October 2026.
audits record the shop advertising 24/7 availability or emergency service, while the after-hours intake behind the claim is usually undescribed.
Source: Turnpike Tech dossier audit, October 2026.
Read the methodology before quoting the numbers. This is a sales prospecting sample, not a random sample of American contractors, and the bias is stated in full below.
The corpus is 105 shop dossiers: 89 New Jersey shops scored as top-fit prospects (Tier A) and 16 national warm leads.
Each dossier records the reviews actually read for that shop (Google and aggregator listings, BBB files where they exist) and a lead-capture audit of the shop's own website and listings: phone prominence, contact or booking form, chat widget, click-to-call, and after-hours handling. One dossier of the 105 is an exclusion record for a shop that had been acquired; its reviews were read and coded the same way.
Each dossier's review section and audit section were coded for recurring themes and audit fields. The headline findings on this page were then verified by re-reading the underlying dossier text file by file. Secondary theme counts come from pattern coding of the dossier text and are labeled as such where they appear.
Example quotes are shortened, reviewer names are removed, and no shop names or towns appear anywhere in this report.
This is a sales prospecting sample, not a random sample of American contractors, and two biases matter:
Complaint rates on this page describe this dossiered set. They should not be republished as rates for all contractors without that caveat attached.
26 of 105 dossiers (25 percent) contain at least one verbatim customer complaint about an unanswered phone, an unreturned call or message, a promised callback that never came, or being ghosted after contact.
Split by cohort: 10 of 89 New Jersey Tier A shops (11 percent, the cleaner prevalence read) and 16 of 16 warm leads (100 percent, selected on this signal). Documented examples include an emergency caller promised a callback who never received one, and a service-contract customer who reported calling for three weeks and leaving a dozen messages with no answer and no return call.
"No one answers the phone. I have been calling for 3 weeks. I have left a dozen messages."
Customer review, shortened. Existing service-contract customer.
"Called for emergency repair service. Said I would receive a call back. No one ever called me back."
Customer review, shortened.
The 26 dossiers break into recurring sub-patterns, each verified in the dossier text:
"We reached out, received a quote, and expressed interest in moving forward, but unfortunately haven't heard back since. I've made a few follow-up calls with no response."
Customer review, shortened.
"They said they would call back with appointment time. They called back 4 days later."
Customer review, shortened. During a heat wave, air conditioning out.
"Gave her both mine and my fiancé's number. Have not heard a word or been reached out to by any of them in 3-4 days."
Customer review, shortened. The office had answered; the callback never came.
"They don't return calls. They're ghosting me and don't answer when I call."
Customer review, shortened.
"You no longer talk to a real person when you call, you get an automated machine."
Customer review, shortened. The same shop's technicians are praised in neighboring reviews.
42 of 105 dossiers (40 percent) were flagged during phone verification because the shop's own website and listings publish different main numbers.
Only 59 of 105 (56 percent) had one consistent main line confirmed across sources; 3 rested on a single source. Before any discussion of answering, a large share of these shops cannot tell a customer which number is the real one.
90 of 105 audits (86 percent) record the shop advertising 24/7 availability or emergency service.
In 14 of 105 dossiers (13 percent), the audit explicitly records that no after-hours answering arrangement is described anywhere on the shop's site or listings. Across the corpus, the audits repeatedly note the same gap in softer language: the claim is published, the mechanism is not.
"Nobody answered the phone until 9am and there was no answering service to leave a message."
Customer review, shortened. A customer of almost 30 years, with no heat.
A live chat widget was found on 2 of 105 shop websites (2 percent); 95 of 105 (90 percent) had none, and 8 were not verified.
A contact form, booking form, or online scheduling path was present in 82 of 105 audits (78 percent) and absent in 14 (13 percent). The typical shop's digital intake is a phone number and a form, nothing more.
73 of 105 dossiers (70 percent) document at least one complaint theme of any kind, and the phone and callback theme, at 26 dossiers, is the largest single failure theme coded.
Pattern coding of those dossiers puts price and billing disputes in at least 7 dossiers and workmanship disputes in at least 5, and scheduling failures in 10 dossiers, individually verified. Scheduling failures include first-appointment no-shows, day-of cancellations communicated at the scheduled arrival time, an online booking that never reached the dispatch schedule, and appointment-day communication breakdowns.
Billing complaints frequently arrive attached to a communication complaint: the dispute is about money, the anger is about not being called back. Price disputes documented in at least 3 more dossiers include a quoted evaluation fee doubled on arrival, an undisclosed dispatch fee, and a consultation refund promised by callback and never issued.
Workmanship is not the story of this corpus; the phone layer is. The phone and callback theme is the only complaint theme that costs the shop a customer who was already trying to buy.
"Never showed, never called. Called again and stated they'd call, never did."
Customer review, shortened. The job went to a competitor who responded immediately.
Communication is the second most praised trait in this corpus: 40 of the 94 dossiers that document praise themes (43 percent), behind professionalism at 50 of 94 (53 percent).
Praise themes, as a share of the 94 dossiers that document them:
| Praise theme | Dossiers | Share of 94 |
|---|---|---|
| Professionalism and quality of the people | 50 | 53% |
| Communication and responsiveness | 40 | 43% |
| Workmanship quality | 35 | 37% |
| Speed and emergency response | 30 | 32% |
| Punctuality and scheduling kept | 23 | 24% |
| Price fairness | 16 | 17% |
The tension in the data: communication is the second most praised trait in this corpus and, when it fails, the most damaging complaint. In at least 5 dossiers, verified by re-reading, the split is explicit in the reviews themselves: field technicians are praised by name while the office and phone layer is attacked. These are not shops with a work problem. They are shops with an answering and follow-up problem sitting on top of good field work.
Phone prominence was rated cleanly in 84 of 105 audits: high or very high in 49 of those 84 (58 percent), moderate in 20 (24 percent), low or weak in 12 (14 percent), mixed in 2, and none in 1.
The remaining 21 dossiers describe placement in prose or did not rate it. At least 2 of 105 shops had no working website at all: one with no website, and one whose domain was listed for sale.
Click-to-call is essentially unmeasured by this corpus, and this report makes no claim about it. 101 of 105 audits record it as not verified, because the audits are text-based and cannot test tap behavior on a phone screen. It was verified present in 1 audit and verified absent in 2.
The gap between the 24/7 claim (90 of 105) and any described intake process remains the single most consistent audit pattern in the corpus.
Dossiers by lead trade: plumbing-led 39, HVAC-led 22, electrical-led 16, roofing 7, garage door 6, pest control 3, and other and multi-trade 12.
Documented phone or callback failure, by lead trade:
| Lead trade | Dossiers | With a documented phone or callback failure |
|---|---|---|
| Plumbing-led | 39 | 15 of 39 (38 percent) |
| HVAC-led | 22 | 9 of 22 (41 percent) |
| Electrical-led | 16 | 0 of 16 |
| Roofing | 7 | 1 of 7 |
| Garage door | 6 | 0 of 6 |
| Pest control | 3 | 0 of 3 |
| Other and multi-trade | 12 | 1 of 12 |
Read this with the selection bias attached: the warm-lead cohort, chosen on phone complaints, is concentrated in plumbing and HVAC, which inflates those two trades' rates. The electrical-led zero comes entirely from the fit-selected Tier A cohort and a sample of 16; it suggests electrical shops in this set document fewer phone complaints, and it does not prove electrical shops generally have none. Roofing (7), garage door (6), and pest control (3) samples are too thin to state trade-level rates honestly, and this report does not.
The pattern across 105 dossiers is consistent: the work is usually good, and the jobs are lost at the answer, the callback, and the follow-up.
That is the gap Turnpike Tech is built to close. A missed call gets a text back in under 60 seconds, in the shop's own voice. The conversation answers the basic questions and books the job into the shop's calendar. Open quotes get chased on day 1, day 3, and day 7 instead of going silent. Finished jobs get a review request, so good field work turns into public proof. And the owner sees the result in a monthly report that shows recovered jobs in dollars.
None of that requires a shop to change how it works in the field. It requires the phone layer to stop leaking the customers the field work already earned.
In Turnpike Tech's audit of 105 contractor shops, 26 of 105 dossiers (25 percent) contained at least one verbatim customer complaint about an unanswered phone, an unreturned call or message, a promised callback that never came, or being ghosted after contact. Among the 89 New Jersey Tier A shops, which were selected on fit rather than complaints, the rate was 10 of 89 (11 percent).
42 of 105 dossiered shops (40 percent) published conflicting main numbers across their own website and listings. Only 59 of 105 (56 percent) had one consistent main line confirmed across sources; 3 rested on a single source.
90 of 105 audits (86 percent) recorded the shop advertising 24/7 availability or emergency service. In 14 of 105 dossiers (13 percent), the audit explicitly recorded that no after-hours answering arrangement was described anywhere on the shop's site or listings, and across the corpus the claim was usually published without the mechanism behind it described.
A contact form, booking form, or online scheduling path was present in 82 of 105 audits (78 percent) and absent in 14 (13 percent). A live chat widget was found on 2 of 105 shop websites (2 percent); 95 of 105 (90 percent) had none, and 8 were not verified.
Of the 94 dossiers that document praise themes, professionalism and quality of the people led at 50 dossiers (53 percent), and communication and responsiveness ranked second at 40 dossiers (43 percent). Communication is the second most praised trait in the corpus and, when it fails, the largest single complaint theme, documented in 26 of 105 dossiers.