Why Centratel?

A message from Centratel President/Majority Owner, Sam Carpenter
01/02/2006

Thank you for your interest in Centratel. There's a LOT of information in this site! But, it's my guess that if you are serious about finding a new telephone answering service and if you take the time to really investigate, starting with the five minutes it takes to read this summary, Centratel will be your last stop.

Except for our testimonial page, I have personally written every word in this website. This website is aimed primarily to inform. Our #1 goal for the site is to provide comprehensive and candid information about the telephone answering service industry and how Centratel operates. Then, if we can accomplish this, and as a by-product, the site will be an advertising tool for us. If you peruse other telephone answering service industry web sites, you'll find mostly advertising, with very little inside information.

I've owned the majority share of this company since 1984. My previous background was engineering and publishing. My personal expertise is in system organizing and operational execution. My passion is to build the highest quality telephone answering service in the United States by establishing sensible goals, focusing relentlessly on those goals, providing the best tools and systems possible for staff and customers, and hiring and taking very good care of hard-working, smart and dedicated long-term employees. You will see these threads throughout this website.

So, in your research, I recommend that at a minimum you read this letter in which I have encapsulated who we are and why we're different. If you want more in-depth information, check the other pages of this site. If you are really the investigative type, check out my personal blog at www.centratel.com/blog, "Inside a Telephone Answering Service." When you are ready to contact us about service for your company or professional office, either call us at 1-800-664-7159 or reach us via the "Price Quote" page on this site.

Within this site you will find twelve basic questions that should be asked of a prospective telephone answering service.

Because you may be price shopping, and I don't want you to waste your time, it's important that I say this now: Our service rates are higher than many other telephone answering services. I can't imagine advertising, as do many of our competitors, "the lowest rates and the highest quality!" That's simply impossible. A telephone answering service that is charging low rates can't possibly pay Telephone Service Representatives (TSRs), the largest cost of any service (and, the people who do the actual call-processing!), much more than minimum wage. In this business, like most others, minimum wage pay equals less qualified people and lots of staff turnover. How could low pay possibly equate with high quality in a telephone answering service, where representatives are handling calls from the customers of literally hundreds of different companies? Processing these calls is tough work, demanding a rare combination of brains, finesse, tenacity and personality: Quality can't happen when the people who take the calls and deliver the messages are not qualified and don't stay with the position long-term. From the beginning, please understand that Centratel simply doesn't play this no-win game. Our quality is super-high because we do what we have to do to make that happen (and that includes NOT being part of the telephone answering service industry price-war game). Our service rates are higher. By being up-front about this, I offer you a congruent message: Our high quality is supported by believable evidence, not promises that could not possibly be kept.

It's true: One "gets what one pays for." As discusssed above, I won't promise the lowest service rates but I will personally guarantee a level of quality that is unsurpassed anywhere. At Centratel, our market is the segment of telephone answering service customers who are truly interested in quality first. We pay our people well; we have independent quality control and customer service departments; our documented system protocols mean zero-defect efficiency and we use the most sophisticated and reliable equipment available. Of course it costs more to do this! It's that simple. There is a reason that a huge majority of our customers had problems with another answering service before they came to us.

In 2005, after over 20 years in business, we coined ourselves the “highest quality telephone answering service in the United States.” It’s a bold statement but not over the top: If the quality of service is not the best you'll find anywhere, it's very close. Tangible evidence of this claim is that our most recent (September through November 2005) "customer reported error" rate was one reported error for every 8,800 message transactions. What better indicator of quality than current customers' direct feedback and continued patronage?

Unlike most telephone answering services, Centratel limits service to a small and specific group of businesses and professions. Focused and knowledgeable, we’re expert in specific categories of business. If your business or profession is among those few categories in which we specialize, our expertise will allow us to seamlessly fit into your operation, providing no-nonsense, high quality answering service that precisely meets your needs.

Background: In the early 80's I managed a family run publishing business here in Bend, Oregon. Over those three years we used all three local answering services twice each, unsuccessfully searching for real quality. In 1984, in frustration, I bought one of the three answering services and proceeded with a single premise, based on our own bitter experience as telephone answering service customers: "Certainly there are customers who will be willing to pay more for the best. Unequaled staff performance will provide Centratel a higher income; this higher income will be routed directly back to answering staff who will be paid according to their individual and group performance. All this will be supported within an organization that is near flawless in its efficiency." It is a simple formula that has held true since the beginning and, within our industry of approximately twenty five hundred answering services nationwide, it's been a big part of placing Centratel within a very, very small circle of elite quality telephone answering services.

Centratel "went national" in 1996, beginning a 600% growth process in the midst of an industry in decline. With toll free service for all of our clients and using the ultra-reliable U.S. telco switched network, Centratel's unmatched quality of service is available to businesses or professions in any part of the country.

2005's strong growth was due almost entirely to new accounts that came to us because they were searching for better service quality than what they were experienceing with their former telephone answering service provider. At the risk of denegrating my own industry, it is my opinion that that quality problems have always been and continue to be chronic to the TAS industry. It is easy to understand why: This is is a very complex business and there is much that can go wrong.

Of course this website and my personal Blog are open to all, including other telephone answering services. I am not concerned about revealing secrets of our success to answering service competitors because the principles we use, although easily understood, take substantial additional monetary investment (Centratel TSR performance-indexed wages, for example, are approximately 40% higher than industry standards) as well as a meticulously organized and executed management process (including two distinctly independent departments: One geared exclusively to answering quality; the other to customer services). It is not easy! How we do what we do is difficult to put into practice and hard to maintain over the long-term.

Following are the fundamental tenets of Centratel quality:

1) This telephone answering service business is an incredibly complex "system of systems" and meticulous organization and point-of-sale execution is absolutely mandatory if there is to be exceptional quality of service: Documented principles, protocol, methodology and honest self-evaluation are at the heart of what we do and how we perform. I list this first because without a thoroughly documented organization with systematic operational protocols, no matter what else an answering service owner does right, there can't be really high quality of service to clients. There are too many things that can go wrong.

2) As mentioned previously, we specialize in certain categories of business. This allows us to become very familiar with just a few specialty vertical markets . Unlike 98% of competing telephone answering services, we don't attempt to "be all things to all people."

3) Our Telephone Service Representative (TSR) and customer service personnel are very well paid earning 40% over industry standards, with 30% of their total compensation keyed directly to their own personal performance. Every one of our staff members is a full-time, career professional. We don't employ part-time staff as is common with most telephone answering services. There is very little staff turnover, with TSR tenures of up to sixteen years. Here's our benchmark: A sizeable percentage of our staff is composed of single mothers with children. It is our policy to pay these single parents enough to support their families AND "have a life." Full-time career people who are well compensated, based on their own personal performance, are people who are very serious about what they do.

As a side-thought, it is interesting to note that the people who answer the phones, the TSR's, are very seldom mentioned in our competitors' web site advertising. Why is that? TSRs are the people who process incoming customer calls and are clearly the heart of any telephone answering service's quality. In reality, whatever telephone answering service you employ, these individuals are the people you will be hiring to talk to your customers, often in urgent situations.

4) Our principles of operation, procedures and system protocols are meticulously created, exactly documented and rigorously applied. Our staff knows what is expected and our clients know what to expect. No surprises and no on-going fire-killing. The result of this attention to detail: very few errors in an industry that is by nature, profoundly error-prone. Note that 98% of Centratel’s newest clients have been with another service previously and virtually all of these clients came to us because of quality problems with their former telephone answering service provider. Our customer churn-rate is one-half the industry average and almost never is an account lost because of a problem with service quality.

5) A distinct and independent department of Centratel, with its own budget, is dedicated to Telephone Service Representative (TSR) quality control. On a continual and intensive basis, a sizeable sampling of each TSR's calls are reviewed in detail. Once each week every TSR meets with our Quality Team to review sampled messages, one-on-one. It's tough and thorough. These reviews are scored and, with a high enough score, TSRs receive a significant monthly bonus. Another independent department is dedicated to the instant answering of questions from clients, not to mention the immediate resolution of any problems that might arise. As with the rest of Centratel's operation, key commonalities of these two departments are intensity, documentation and point-of sale (in which any customer issue is handled NOW). Each of the managers of these two departments reports directly to the President/General Manager/majority owner of the company: me.

6) Drug testing is frequent and thorough. Centratel has a zero-tolerance policy on drug abuse. Without going into detail, trust that for a variety of reasons this is a very important point for any telephone answering service.

7) Our telecom and internal communications equipment and systems are cutting edge, offering the highest level of reliability and the widest selection of service options available anywhere. We employ a full time, career CMSE qualified IT engineer.

8) Each of our clients has a/message taking/message delivery protocol designed to meet their company's exact needs.

9) If there is an error on our part, that error is a very big deal. All details of any complaint, and all details of that complaint's resolution, are immediately shared with EVERY employee and Board member of the company (Sam Kirkaldie, Linda Rosenthal, Andi Freeman, Hollee Welch and me) via Email and/or voice mail.

10) Every call is recorded via Centratel's integrated high-tech voice recording system. Any question about a call can be answered by a simple review of the caller-TSR dialog. Messages can be delivered to the client via internet WAV file. As an option, and for a small monthly fee, calls can be kept on file for three years.

11) My co-owner, Sam Kirkaldie, and I, are intimately involved in day-to-day operations

So, in this rather lengthy nutshell, you have an overview of Centratel! If you have a question or comment, don't hesitate to call me at 1-800-639-1818 or email me at samc@centratel.com. And, as mentioned at the beginning of this letter, for an even deeper and more personal insight into the answering service business and how Centratel operates, check out my personal Blog at www.centratel.com/blog entitled "Inside a Telephone Answering Service." And again, when you are ready to contact us about service for your company or professional office, either call us at 1-800-664-7159 or reach us via the "Price Quote" page on this site.

Thanks again for your interest!

-Sam Carpenter
President, Centratel