The Answering Service Industry
Updated November 7, 2025
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 ’70s, as voice mail, cellular, paging, and sophisticated telephone company switching services became commonplace, the percentage of businesses and professions using traditional telephone answering services 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 20,000 to less than 100.
And note, a steep decline in independent answering services was dramatically accelerated by the COVID lockdowns of early 2020. Here is an excerpt from the recently published 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 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 mega-answering service operations, two of them foreign-owned.”
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 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 2024, that the 6-foot rule “sort of just appeared.”)
Despite these gyrations, 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 or some gimmicky AI platform (that doesn’t fool anyone.) For these businesses and professions, human-to-human interaction is mandatory.
And here’s the immediate problem: Now, there simply aren’t that many high-quality answering services from which to choose.
The industry has historically suffered a bad reputation, and for good reason: an answering service operation is incredibly complex, and a multitude of things can go wrong. It’s based on moment-to-moment human decision-making as well as complex telephone equipment and networks. And, it’s active 24/7/365. To survive at all is a challenge. To excel and grow is a significant achievement. The challenge is compounded by the typical answering service owner’s failure to invest in strategies that could consistently produce the highest quality.
To stay afloat, many surviving answering services cut costs by compensating Telephone Service Representatives (TSRs) with minimal wages/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 answering service quality equal to or better than your own front office staff.
In truth, “a handful” is probably an exaggeration. COVID-19 devastated the industry.
And how does one find the highest quality answering service? It’s not easy. There are no resources that you will find that rank quality.
However, at Centratel we consider ourselves “the highest quality answering service in the United States.” We support this contention with a variety of measurables including the most fundamental indicator: the number of customer complaints received. This is the “Customer Reported Error Rate” (CRER) statistic. Our most recent CRER (January through December, 2024) was 1 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.
For further information about the ins and outs of the answering service 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, 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 CEO, Centratel
