Inside a Telephone Answering Service

Centratel Principles of Growth

In the Answering Service Resources section of our company website is the essay Seven Principles of Growth. It's a distillation of what I have found important in our growth over the past twenty years.

Your Command of the English Language

I wrote the essay Your Command of the English Language for our Telephone Service Representatives (TSR's) and administrative staff in order to point out the obvious: how we speak - and how we write - has everything to do with gaining the respect of the people with whom we communicate. I am continually amazed that so many people are unable to coherently express themselves. I am not a professional editor or writer: but, despite my own flawed command of the language, I will go out on a limb here as my company is a tele-communications company...

Regarding our TSR's:  Some are college graduates but most are not: our typical employee has some college, is single, has children and works for Centratel to make a living. So, as our main objective is to provide the highest quality answering service in the United States, we work relentlessly to help our people develop top notch writing and speaking skills. The great thing about working as a TSR is that personal diction and communication skills are "worked out" all day long. It's the perfect place to practice communicating with others: in a given shift of work, a TSR talks to literally hundreds of people, each with a different need and each with a unique comportment. It has been said that "communication is everything." I agree...

Finally, consider dictionary.com for help with spelling, meaning, synonyms and further reference.

State of the Answering Service Industry

The following article is helpful, I think, to orient potential or current answering service customers to the “state of the industry.” When first published on our website (www.centratel.com) in 2002, the article raised some hackles within the industry. In years past I have been president of a couple of national trade organizations and one regional organization. In my last position, as the president of a national trade group, I managed to run afoul of the old-hand, standard-bearer’s accepted protocol. So, we’ve “gone underground” as a business making choices based on our own experiences, premises and logic. There are more than a few answering service “industry darling” ideas that we have ignored as we’ve forged ahead doing what seems best for our clients. I think we’ve done well. For whatever the reasons, as the number of TAS businesses has shrunk to a tiny percentage of its former self, Centratel has experienced robust growth.

About the Industry

One could say that the answering service industry, now better known as the call center industry, has not been part of the telecommunications boom of the last twenty years…

It’s a simple truth: Since 1980, the total number of businesses and professions using traditional answering services or call centers has declined by approximately 70% as voice mail, cellular, paging and sophisticated telephone company switching services have become commonplace. Accordingly, the number of call centers in the United States and Canada has declined from over seven thousand to fewer than two thousand. The international trade association for our industry counts fewer than 200 in it’s membership.

Historically, there was a broad cross section of businesses and professions that outsourced to call centers as there were no other alternatives. Today, although belonging to a relatively narrow group of professions and businesses, customers absolutely require-and will continue to require-a human being at the end of the line. There just aren’t that many call centers from which to choose.

To stay afloat, many surviving call centers cut costs by providing minimum wages/benefits to staff while failing to upgrade to the necessary digital equipment. Also, many services generally avoid investment in the tangible and non-tangibles that would result in a high quality service for end-users just like you. The predictable outcome: In North America there are just a handful of high-quality call centers, and it’s probable that one of the “best-of-the-best” is not in your local calling area…

The good news is that the long distance telephone network has become ultra-reliable, sophisticated and inexpensive. This puts quality call centers such as Centratel at your doorstep. We work to establish a local presence: there are no long distance charges for our clients and, in most cases, there is a local service representative physically and immediately available in your city. We’re not a large company and we’re not small either: small enough to offer you personalized service yet large enough to offer the most sophisticated options available anywhere.

The irony of being ultra high-tech is that this complexity provides our Telephone Service Representatives (TSR’s) with simple-to-operate tools that allow them to be calm, relaxed and personable with your callers and with you.

An Answering Service Introduction

My name is Sam Carpenter and I am majority share owner of Colejenn, the umbrella corporation for Centratel, a high-tech telephone answering service (TAS) located in Bend, Oregon. I am the General Manager and CEO of the business. In an industry that includes some 2,500+ services nationwide, Centratel serves a relatively narrow band of vertical business answering service categories. Our answering service client base, 75% of which is outside Oregon, is comprised of approximately 700 accounts ranging from medical clinics to HVAC companies to funeral homes to veterinarians to property management companies. Providing “live operator assistance” exclusively to businesses and professions 24/7/365, approximately 95% of our business is derived from providing the following specific answering service functions:

1) Screening incoming calls and then delivering emergency messages to on-call personnel and/or
2) Taking and delivering messages while offering a “front office” image to small companies

The other 5% of our business covers a wide range of very specific call handling tasks including taking orders, setting appointments and providing information, etc.

Our expressed goal is to be "the highest quality answering service in the United States." At the risk of arrogance or simple naivety, it's my firm conviction that Centratel is, at a minimum, within the top 1% of quality services available anywhere. Notwithstanding the subjectivity of measuring "high quality" within this industry, there are very tangible reasons for this assumption. Review them in our website at centratel.com

My partner,  good friend and very active staff member, Sam Kirkaldie (yes, both owners of the company are named Sam...) is 9% owner of the umbrella corporation, Colejenn.  Sam heads up our special "assertive customer care" department. It's a unique concept as we developed the department from scratch; its sole purpose to reach out to clients twice yearly to "see how things are going" and to keep account details updated. This effort is not typically taken by our competitors.

December 1st, 2004 marked Centratel’s 20th anniversary. Within an industry that has contracted by over 70% in the last twenty five years, we’ve grown from monthly revenues of $5,000 back at our begining in 1984 to $170,000 now. I created this Blog as an information source for anyone considering using an answering service, for current customers AND as information for others in the industry: our competitors. What goes around, comes around. I’m also going to add some items of personal interest.