Updated January 30, 2025 by Sam Carpenter, Centratel CEO and owner
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, internet, and sophisticated telephone company switching services became ubiquitous, the percentage of businesses and professions using traditional telephone answering service has declined by more than ninety percent. In lock-step, the number of independent answering services in the United States and Canada has declined from over twenty thousand to less than two-hundred.
The steady decline in independent answering services over the decades was dramatically accelerated in the last five years by the COVID lockdowns of early 2020. Here is an excerpt from the just-released 5th edition of my book, Work the System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less.
“…the answering service industry was eviscerated by the early 2020 social-distancing mandates propagated by various governmental agencies. Technically limited and unable to meet the mandates, I estimate that over 90 percent of small to midsize TAS operations immediately disappeared, most of them gobbled up by large foreign-owned mega-answering service operations.“
And, here’s another excerpt:
“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. Anthony Fauci and associates as the chief propagators. (Fauci said, in his House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic testimony in January ’2024, that ‘the 6-foot rule ‘sort of just appeared.’” Thoughtless and callous leadership. Power-hungry people. Clown show leadership. 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 nor AI. For certain businesses and professions, human-to-human interaction is mandatory.
And here’s the 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 constant human decision-making as well as complex telephone equipment and networks. It’s a 24/7/365 proposition that day-in and day-out 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 and now in its 5th edition which was published in August 2024. You can find it on Amazon or your local bookstore. Or, call us to inquire about answering service and we’ll send you a hard copy, gratis. (The book retails for $45.)
To stay afloat, many surviving answering services cut costs by compensating Telephone Service Representatives (TSRs) with minimal 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 or better than 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.
Most “mega-service” subsidiaries bill their clients by the elapsed time of the agent/caller interaction. We bill by the task. The former is expensive and error-prone. The latter is quick, easy, and inexpensive. See the home page of this site for more details. Also, see items #6 and #9 on our “Getting Started” page
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: A telephone answering service’s bottom-line quality of service based on complaints from customers. This is reflected in the “Customer Reported Error Rate” statistic. Our most recent Customer Reported Error Rate (January through December, 2024) was 1 customer-reported error for every 6,161 message transactions processed. Considering the complexity of the work and at the risk of puffery, this is a remarkable statistic, unmatched anywhere.
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 for over 40 years, Centratel provides 24/7/365 toll-free service throughout the United States and Canada. So, if your business or profession is one of our specialties, investigate this website further. Then, contact us via phone (1-800-664-7159) or through this website via the Getting Started page.
-Sam Carpenter, CEO and owner
