Updated June 28, 2024
The telephone answering service industry has not been part of the telecommunications boom of the last forty years.
It’s a simple truth: Since the late 70’s, as voice mail, cellular, paging and sophisticated telephone company switching services became commonplace, the percentage of businesses and professions using traditional telephone answering service has declined by more than ninety percent. In lock-step, the number of answering services in the United States and Canada has declined from over twenty thousand to less than four-hundred.
The steep decline in independent answering services was dramatically exasperated in the last four years by the COVID lockdowns of early 2020. Here is an excerpt from the soon-to-be-released 5th edition of my book, Work the System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less, to be released in late August 2024:
“The answering service industry was eviscerated by the social-distancing mandates propagated by various governmental agencies. I estimate that over 90 percent of smaller, low-tech TAS operations immediately disappeared due to the early 2020 social distancing mandates, gobbled up by three superlarge foreign-owned mega-answering service operations.”
And, here’s another excerpt from the book:
“This is a textbook example of how ill-conceived governmental regulation can destroy industries, families, and lives. The off-the-cuff, arbitrary six-foot distancing mandate of early 2020 did it. That ruling came out of nowhere, yet it was gospel overnight. TSR/agent cubicles were suddenly illegal. The decision to implement the rule wasn’t “science,” and no one even knows who thought it up. But one can point the finger at the currently collapsing “expert” class, especially including Dr. Tony Fauci and friends as the chief propagators. (Fauci said, in his House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic testimony in January ’24, that the 6-foot rule “sort of just appeared.”) Thoughtless and callous leadership. Power-hungry people. Clown show. I could go on. But, ’nuff said.” . . .
Despite all this, although fewer in number and belonging to relatively narrow vertical markets, today’s telephone answering service customer still absolutely requires a real human being at the end of the line, not a recorded message and not AI. For these businesses and professions, human-to-human interaction is mandatory.
And here’s the immediate problem: There simply aren’t that many high-quality answering services from which to choose.
The industry has always suffered a bad reputation, and for good reason: answering service is an incredibly complex business, and much can go wrong. The service is based on human decision-making as well as complex telephone equipment and networks. Telephone answering service is a 24/7/365 proposition that constantly provides emergency call support as well as routine call processing. To survive at all is a challenge. To excel and grow is a significant achievement. And the challenge is compounded by the typical answering service owner’s failure to invest in the strategies that could produce the highest quality. (I speak extensively of simple, pragmatic steps to business efficiency and profitability in the book I wrote entitled Work the System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less. Published originally in 2008 but revised in its 4th edition edition and published in February 2021, you can find it on Amazon or your local bookstore. (As noted above, the fifth edition will be released in August 2024)
To stay afloat, many surviving answering services cut costs by compensating Telephone Service Representatives (TSRs) with minimum wages and benefits while failing to upgrade equipment. Too many are locked in a who-can-offer-the-lowest-price battle. Predictably, especially because of the industry’s historical low-pay/high staff turnover syndrome, there are just a handful of high-quality answering services in the United States. These select services offer quality equal to your own in-house front office staff.
And how does one find the highest quality answering service? Good luck: There are no resources that you will find that rank quality. The best one can do is take the time to investigate and make an informed choice.
However, at Centratel we consider ourselves “the highest quality answering service in the United States.” We support this contention with a variety of statistics including the most fundamental indicator available: A telephone answering service’s bottom-line quality of service to customers. At Centratel this is reflected in the “Customer Reported Error Rate” statistic. Our most recent Customer Reported Error Rate (April through June, 2024) was 1 customer-reported error for every 6,491 message transactions processed. Considering the complexity of the work and the risk of puffery, this is a remarkable statistic.
For further information about the ins and outs of the business, check our FAQ page. And, here are some “case studies” of typical Centratel answering service accounts
Headquartered in Bend, Oregon, Centratel provides 24/7/365 toll-free service throughout the United States. So, if your business or profession is one of our specialties, thoroughly investigate this website. Then, contact us via phone (1-800-664-7159) or through this website via the Price Quote page.
-Sam Carpenter
President and majority owner, Centratel
