A: There is a good reason for this. Most mega answering service subsidiaries and every single one of the dozen surviving human-first independent services charge their clients via “time-billing.” This is the elapsed time that agents spend processing calls (and often includes customer on-hold time, customer service calls, etc.). This encourages the employment of low-paid agents because the longer it takes to process a call, the more the client is billed. And at any answering service, new, inexperienced agents are not just agonizingly slow as they learn on the job; they make errors. Not only that, the expensive charge-by-the-minute billing method is the perfect platform for overcharging customers because it is impossible for the customer to verify billings. Here’s an instance of customers winning a multi-million dollar class-action lawsuit against their own time-billing answering service! Note that here at Centratel, a large percentage of our new customers come to us because of quality and/or billing problems with their high-staff-turnover mega-answering service subsidiary (which continues to advertise the name of the local purchased service even though calls are routed elsewhere for processing). Yes, with elapsed-time billing, high cost and poor quality are inextricably connected.