The Difference Between an Answering Service and a Call Center
By Sam Carpenter, founder and President of Centratel.
Revised, January 4, 2021
Answering Services and Call Centers are not the same….
A telephone answering service (or simply, “TAS”) serves a narrow assortment of business types. These vertical markets include doctors, veterinarians, property management companies, HVAC companies, funeral homes, hospice home health services, and certain other businesses that require 24/7/365 phone coverage in which, and here’s the key: the caller must speak to a real human being.
There are ten “vertical market” business categories that make up the huge bulk of Centratel’s answering service’s clientele. Call centers, on the other hand, deal with a large “horizontal” cross section of the customers of a relatively few large businesses. The typical answering service has 4-50 workstations. The typical call center has upwards of 200.
For both, in these days of Covid-19, the classic cubicle-style operation is virtually dead. Answering services and call centers now almost exclusively employ “remote” operators who work from their home offices.
Within the answering service industry, the term “call center” is occasionally used interchangeably for what, in some quarters, has been considered the outdated term “telephone answering service.” However, here at Centratel, we believe the traditional term “answering service” not only fits better, it has even regained a bit of a campy feel over the past couple of years… a bit of a retro-appeal. More importantly, in contrast to call center call processing, the term highlights the much more complex demands of answering for hundreds if not thousands of different customer accounts.
An answering service account is handled very differently from a call center account.
Answering service accounts:
- are smaller, more detailed, and handle a large number of small to medium-sized businesses
- require never-ending timely and critical decision-making; and
- involve additional steps based around message-delivery, both urgent and non-urgent, beyond simple information gathering.
An answer service requires an intricate, multi-layered emergency message delivery protocol. The demands on the answering service telephone service representative (TSR) are profound: there is constant decision-making. The TSR must demonstrate one-on-one personal communication expertise including the ability to understand a wide-ranging array of cultural subtleties. A Solid command of the English language, both spoken and written, is essential. Call center employees can be off-shore, in other countries. Not so with an answering service.
Answering Your Calls: “Is this an emergency?”
An answering service caller must be handled with concern and empathy by the TSR who must have a firm grasp of their responsibilities to the client while understanding the subtleties of that particular industry…as well as the culture of that business category. For instance, visualize a panicked mother who calls late at night to reach her doctor to see what to do next with her sick infant. Consider a grocery store manager who phones their HVAC to report their freezer has failed on a hot day with the potential loss of a huge investment in frozen goods within a matter of hours. Or, imagine the emotional plight of an elderly woman calling a funeral home to say her husband of fifty years has just passed away at home.
So, the TSR must handle a variety of callers with finesse and empathy, be responsible for accurate decision-making under pressure, sometimes make critical gray-area decisions and, finally, deliver the information quickly and accurately.
“Do you want that in Pink or Blue?”
The call center transaction requires information gathering where the representative (agent) taking (or making) the call simply asks prearranged questions of the caller. A call center account tends to be larger in volume, and calls are simple to process. The pre-arranged handling calls is “scripted.” In other words, the question/answer protocol between the call center agent and the caller is strictly guided, so that each information input from the caller leads directly to another scripted question from the agent. Typical call center activity includes taking subscriptions for magazines, recording orders from a catalog, or customer service related “outbound” calls to gather post-purchase information from a consumer.
Typically, the call center agent handles just a few accounts in the course of an 8 or 10 hour shift, processing the same information over and over. The answering service TSR handles hundreds of accounts within a shift, each of which offers a unique, complex and demanding challenge. At Centratel, we serve approximately 1,500 answering service accounts, and every TSR must be able to process calls from any one of these accounts. Due to our intensely system-driven protocols, Centratel’s accuracy rate is superb, truly the highest quality found in any answering service in the United States: Our most recent Customer Reported Error Rate (January through December, 2024) was 1 customer-reported error for every 6,161 message transactions processed.
The basis of Centratel’s operating methodology is described in my book Work The System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less. (The 4th edition was published in January 2021). You can buy it on Amazon or in your local book store. And there is this: If you operate or manage a business, and inquire about service with Centratel, we’ll send you the 4th edition hardcover for free.
Another distinction between the answering service and the call center is the average duration of a call. The average answering service call duration is approximately 45 seconds. For a call center, it’s two to three minutes.
Finally, and underscoring the above distinctions between the two types of businesses, the software/hardware necessary to process call center calls is vastly different from what is used in an answering service.
In deciding whether your need is for a telephone answering service or a call center, consider the above black-and-white distinctions. Employ a true call center if your business requires simple, “chained” dialog, order-taking, or when you require “outbound” customer service oriented calling. However, if your business or profession lies within the more complex scope of an answering service, select a service that will inspire confidence, be predictable, treat callers with respect, maintain confidentiality, and enhance your image within the community.
For guidance in interviewing a potential answering service or call center, see “12 Questions to Ask.” And, here are the four measures of a top quality answering service.
