Inside a Telephone Answering Service

For our Answering Service Clients: A $500 Reward for Referrals

We've increased our customer referral reward. Here are details, exactly as posted on the Centratel website:

To our customers:
Centratel is one of the few growing answering services in the United States. Of course, we have to do a certain amount of overt marketing but a major source of new accounts has been via referrals from current clients. Thanks to your good will, and with little prompting from us, we’ve had a steady stream of new accounts through this program.

So, for 2009 we will continue to promote growth from referrals and have, in fact, increased the reward effective January 23, 2009.

Here it is: We will pay a $500 cash reward for your referral that leads to a new Centratel answering service account. The new client must contact us regarding starting service and we must know you referred them (in advance, you can inform us that the party is going to contact us, or the new account can tell us you referred them). The new account must then stay with us in good standing for a minimum of 90 days. Once the 90 days have passed, we will send you a check. With complete confidentiality, we’ll send the check to your company, to you personally at your home, or to your preferred charity. We can also simply credit your account. Your choice!

This offer is not limited to our clients and their employees. It is also available to former clients, vendors, friends and neighbors.

For more information, email Andi Freeman (andif@centratel.com). You can always call, too: 1-800-664-7159.

Thanks!

-Sam Carpenter, President

$400 Reward

We've just come up with some statistics and found that, over the past six months, customer referrals were the largest source of our new accounts. We are determined to keep our customers happy and in doing that, find they send their friends to us. For this, we pay a $400 referral fee. Go here to find out the details. Thanks for your referrals!

-sc

New, Free Service: Pick Up Your Messages On-Line

For 2009, we have a free new service designed to make your life easier: Real-time access to your messages via the internet. Now you can see all of your messages online 24/7! You can track messages from the time they are taken until the time they are delivered, and every step in between, 24/7/365. From any location, you’ll have access to messages going back 90 days. Yes, you can print all of your messages, or any portion of them, anytime. Here are two real-life scerarios:

Scenario 1:

Your receptionist calls in sick, the weather is bad, or for one reason or another your office closes for the day. You forward the phones to Centratel, and  instead of revising your message relay, you simply log onto your account – wherever you are –and see the messages as they come in.

Scenario 2:

You are on vacation. However, you would like to occasionally check up on business activity while gone. You can simply check the messages on your account via any computer that has internet connectivity.

The service is password protected so your messages always remain private. And, remember, the service is free. Call or email Hollee Wilson to receive your password and ID. Her telephone number is 1-888-482-4393 and email is holleew@centratel.com.

 

Thank You Denise Landers

Here's a link to a blog posting that Denise Landers put up. She did a good job of summarizing basic protocol for documentation. Thanks Denise! -sc

Discount for Payment in Advance (Great tax write-off, too...).

Note: we will be providing a discount for those accounts that want to pay a year in advance. It’s a great tax write-off, too. For the discount, the payment must be sent to us by December 31^st. For details, see this page on the Centratel website.

Greenleaf, book price increase (buy now!), self indulgence

My book, Work the System: The Simple Mechanics of Working Less and Making More, is in it's second printing, and the third printing is being prepared by our new publisher, Greenleaf Book Group. (We self-published the first two printings.) It's been fun, putting together and then talking about the book in various forums. At the risk of self-indulgence, it's doing well, too, evidenced by website sales approaching 2,000 copies, and having a publisher in the mix now. For a first-time author, landing a publisher is not easy and it's been a long, hard road of interviews, blog postings and speaking which has led to our success in finding Greenleaf.

Check out the book's website noted above. If your work is driving you crazy with fire-killing, and/or you aren't making enough money, "Work" will be meaningful to you.

Greenleaf will have the hard-back version in Barnes and Noble and all major bookstores in May 2009. Until then, the book is available at our website.

Our first Boot Camp is scheduled for October 20 and 21. There is a large discount on this first effort, plus a guarantee.

Meanwhile, things at Centratel are good. We've had particularly strong growth since the first of the year. Most of our new accounts come from search engine traffic, and referrals from current customers. Our client base stands at just under 1,000.