Inside a Telephone Answering Service

It's About the Systems

It’s a Tuesday morning in February, here in Bend, Oregon. It’s cold out there, bleak and gray. I sit in the local wi-fi cafe hotspot, Bellatozza, enjoying a hot cup of black.

It’s 8:00am. This new Blog has been created, I am told by our webmaster, to enhance our rankings in the various search engines. It's my job to make as many entries as possible, each of them somehow linking back to our website. I started the thing reluctantly. But now, it seems my attitude has turned the corner to the more healthy position of actually looking forward to pumping yet another blurb into it. Today I realize it’s a catharsis. If some insight strikes, I get to tell the world although, I suspect, not many are seeing these pages. Regardless, for me this is a permutation linking ego-boost and civic duty. Whatever.

This morning I am thinking of our internal communication tools and how they lead to better personal interaction between staff members, not to mention a clock-like mechanical functioning of a multitude of interacting systems. There is always the small tweak…a manager who feels compelled to respond to a staff member's email with another email when a face-to-face is more appropriate, the small problem we’re having with Outlook right now: individual tasks are not always updated (our tech is on it this morning) and last week, the ease of sending a voice mail message to everyone in my employment over-riding my better sense to first run a new idea past management (our ease of broadcasting a message to everyone via voice mail or Email is like a Corvette: one can get too rambunctious with that shiny red rocket…it’s too easy to go too fast).

But, it’s all good as long as we work at it every day, refining and holding back, adjusting and enhancing...It’s the communication systems that allow us to keep things on track. In this Answering Service business there are literally hundreds of simultaneously functioning systems: computer and human, mechanical and political. It’s a system of systems that can get wildly out of control unless the details of the systems themselves are constantly examined and improved, or many times, consciously abandoned just to keep things simple. And now, after years of seeing things this way and witnessing the results, it’s become second nature to create or improve our systems rather than kill fires. It’s all so Stephen Covey.

And, in a system of systems, there must be master guidelines; a central control for everything else. For Centratel, it's two documents: our Strategic Objective (too personal to publish here) along with our our "Principles For Operation."

It's 9:00AM now and this coffee shop is getting too full. The line of caffeine seekers is backed up to the entrance door. I don't like crowds all that much so, goodbye for today...

The People at Centratel

I'm back in Bend this Sunday morning, after a week of business in Washington, D.C. It's a great city; a place that should not be visited alone, but with a loved one. Give your tour of the Mall at least a week, preferably two weeks...and don't forget the new World War Two memorial...

While there, and just after I returned home this weekend, I heard from two friends complimenting us for displaying photos and information about each of our staff members on our web site. It's always been my personal contention that the heart of our operation, our people, should be available for our customers and potential customers to "meet." Why do so few answering services mention their people in their websites? Why is it that the vast majority of answering services physically locate their operational staff in a place within the office that is not visible to walk-in traffic? I don't understand it.

Like Southwestern Airlines, Centratel philosophy revolves around the idea that staff comes first. How else can we have an infrastructure that really, truly takes care of customers? If staff is secondary, how can this devalued entity possibly be top-notch and provide superb service to the people who pay us?

Our "staff comes first" philosophy is not a give-away. We ask 110% and reward generously for top-flight performance. Centratel is a "you will be paid for your performance" company and we make no bones about it. In a way, we take for granted ethical behavior and loyalty; these are absolute requirements and as such, are just part of the job and no one is congratulated or paid extra for these most basic attributes. I can't imagine one of our staff members being unethical or disloyal (go ahead: color me naive but that's my story and I'm stickin' to it). At Centratel, extra compensation and career advancement come into play when performance is superb. -sc

1/1/2005 Rate Increase Details

On January 1st 2005 we instituted a rate increase for our answering service and voice mail/paging accounts. As our 20th year anniversary on December 1st approached, it seemed appropriate to take a hard look at our overall profitability philosophy and at the numbers themselves.

As we examined each of our accounts, it was startling to realize that 35% of our client base was unprofitable. As CEO and direction-setter, my recommendation to our Board of Directors was that we make changes so that “no single client will remain unprofitable” and that “no account will blindly subsidize another account.” Fellow board members Sam Kirkaldie, Linda Taylor and Emily Katt, agreed. The rate increase, designed to make the unprofitable profitable, would be substantial for many clients, some of whom would see increases approaching 200%.

It should be said that many accounts saw no increases whatsoever—or small increases—as they were profitable at the time we did our audit.

The prospect of the increases created a degree of anxiety within Centratel management; some staff members speculated that we could lose a sizeable portion of our client base. My contention was that our quality was superb and that we could implement the increases without dramatic injury to the business. It seemed to me that we might lose as much as 12-15% of our client base but that it still made philosophical and practical sense to make this change: We are a privately held company and are entitled to more than break-even on each account that we serve.

We received a number of inquires of course, especially from clients who saw increases of 40% or more. We explained our position one-on-one, faxed or emailed them an FAQ that was a thorough discussion of our reasoning, and hoped that we could convince these clients to stay with the company. We can report that out of our client base of seven hundred, we’ve lost only a total of eight accounts directly due to the increase. This represents slightly more than 1% of our total clients. This lack of attrition was gratifying; We can only conclude that our customers, most of whom have experienced poor quality at answering services elsewhere, made the decision to pay the extra cost for the exceptionally high quality that Centratel provided rather than take their chances elsewhere.

In the spirit of full disclosure, and as a broad cross sectional explanation of our thinking regarding quality and cost, see the FAQ document that we sent to inquiring clients. -sc

Getting the job done

I find myself in Washington, DC this week, after a week or so in Argentina. So, with some extra time on my hands, I wrote an article about something near and dear to my heart: "Getting the Job Done." For a manager, is there any trait more important than this?

FAQ's: an overview

It struck me this morning that the FAQ's in our Centratel website are a great resource for those shopping for an answering service, as well as for our own customers who want more information. -sc

Newsletter

See our semi-monthly newsletter for articles, suggestions and facts about our business and the telephone answering service business in general. The newsletter is pointed directly at our customers. The first issue was published in December 2004. -sc.

What is an Answering Service?

• Answering services: There are probably 2,000 of them in the United States. As I travel (two days ago I returned from a mountain climbing expedition in Argentina), I am often asked "what do you do?" It's never an easy explanation. It seemed logical to think out a solid definition, add some information on what makes a difference in the quality provided to clients, and then get it down hard-copy. The article "Answering Service Definition"  explains that a Telephone Answering Service (TAS) is unlike the typical cellular, paging or telephone service provider that provides a usually consistent high level of service quality: from one TAS to another, the quality of service is wildly fluctuating.