8/15/2021 (Revised 1/20/2026)
For many years we had been asking ourselves how Centratel could survive an evacuation of our headquarters building. As it stood, our building in downtown Bend, Oregon could be completely evacuated for any number of reasons, including bomb threats, street-gang civil unrest, fire, and so on. We would not be able to process calls—and within days, we would literally be out of business.
We had started seriously discussing various options in January 2018, when IT and telephony technologies had advanced enough to make handling calls from telephone service receptionist (TSR) home offices a practical consideration. But other matters took precedence, and the project was shifted to the back burner. Then, in August 2019, we had a bomb threat two blocks away at the county courthouse, and authorities stopped just short of emptying our building. We were lucky. We fell just outside the evacuation radius. For several hours, everyone between us and the courthouse had to vacate their offices.
No matter the reason for evacuating, we can’t just turn off our operations because so many of our accounts—across the United States—depend on us to process their emergency calls. It’s our promise to our clients to always be available. In fact, for the last forty-one years, Centratel has never been offline for more than an hour (and that 60-minute outage happened thirty-three years ago).
So, seeing the bomb scare as a “red flag for improvement,” our operations and IT staff instantly re-focused on what it would take to survive a complete office evacuation. We found that it would be possible to have TSRs process calls from another ad hoc central location or, more likely, from their homes, but only with serious modifications to IT infrastructure, telephony, and associated esoteric protocols and hardware. We needed to develop proprietary software and engineer some innovative, groundbreaking IoT (“Internet of Things”) physical devices.
The initiative had to comply with strict HIPAA (The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) requirements that set super-high standards for end-to-end cryptography and ePHI (Electronic Protected Health Information) data protection.
Based on our Strategic Objective and Operating Principles, we revised our priorities and vigorously resumed the engineering process. We relied on our IT engineers, Marcello and Manu, based in Italy and Romania, and on our senior IT engineer in Bend, Oregon, Jason. Andi, our COO, coordinated the effort.
We had targeted June 1, 2020, to complete the testing, at which point we would be able to instantly “flip a switch” so the entire company could seamlessly function from anywhere outside our HQ building, especially via our Telephone Service Receptionists (TSRs) who would work from their individual home offices.
All was proceeding well enough, but then the unexpected national COVID-19 lockdown began in the first week of March 2020, about the time we were scheduled to start testing. Andi took assertive action, convincing me that we must finish the project NOW! She said that if we did nothing, within 30 days we would no longer be able to process calls from inside our office. So, we dropped all other long- and short-term engineering system-improvement projects to focus exclusively on “going virtual.” There was no other choice: a shutdown scenario would end Centratel as a business, as our clients rushed to other still-operational answering services to process their emergency calls.
To add to the challenge during this crunch time, our Italian IT team members were quarantined at home for 14 straight weeks due to COVID. And I mean quarantined! They could not leave their homes/offices without special government-written permission. If they ventured outside without paperwork and were caught, they would be jailed: not an optimal condition if we were to get the necessary engineering accomplished within such a short timeframe….
They, and the rest of us, forged ahead.
So, for Centratel, operating without a central call center facility was the mother of all challenges. For 36 years, we had been processing all of our incoming calls, 24/7/365, from a single headquarters building in Bend, Oregon.
Concurrently, another hurdle was ensuring this was a smooth transition for our TSRs, who would work from home offices. Each had to have high-speed internet, the proper computer equipment, and a quiet, private home office to process calls. We accelerated the testing, purchased more backup equipment, and retrained our TSRs on the new protocols.
We had to make it happen fast. We pushed hard and within 30 days, all of our TSRs were operating from their home offices just in time for the Oregon COVID-19 lockdown.
Concurrently, every other independent answering service in the United States faced the same immediate 30-day challenge, and ninety-nine percent of them went out of business, either abruptly shutting down or selling their customers like commodities to a foreign-owned “mega-service.”
Thank you, Andi, Marcello, Manu, Jason, and team!
-Sam Carpenter, President and majority owner, Centratel, Llc.
