Rates

Bulletin: Price Adjustment

Sam Carpenter, President and CEO
April 1, 2025

With the exception of periodic cost-of-living adjustments, we have not had a general increase in billing rates for decades. Now, beginning on May 1st, we must institute a long-overdue increase in our customer pricing.

In June 2020, due to the COVID lockdown, we raised our staff compensation by a significant 40%. Since then, Centratel has absorbed all of that increase, and in doing so, we’ve fallen into the lower range of answering service rates in the United States: a three on a ten-point price comparison scale.

We are a 24/7/365 “live operator” operation and wages to staff in 2024 comprised 62% of our total operating cost, so you can see that the large staff compensation increase instituted back in 2020 has been a burden. We can’t keep absorbing that increase and survive, much less maintain our best-quality-in-the-U.S. promise.

Below is an overview of the U.S. answering service industry shake-out over the last five years. It’s been tumultuous:

1. Since the beginning of the COVID debacle in February 2020, our industry has devolved from a large collection of locally operated independent services to one dominated by a handful of huge “mega” operations, with the largest ones foreign-owned. Of the approximately 2,500 independent answering services back in 2019, there is something less than 200 remaining.
2. Here’s what happened: When local long-established independent answering services could not technically adapt to the March 2020 COVID 6-foot distancing mandates that rendered agent-cubicles illegal, the encroaching mega-services bought out those services’ soon-to-be-abandoned customers at distressed, fire-sale prices.
3. Usually, the encroaching mega-service cloaked their acquisition by retaining the original local name of the purchased service. But local physical presence ended, with call processing and customer service calls routed elsewhere, sometimes offshore.

So, for Centratel to survive and continue to employ our 100% U.S.-based English-language-speaking team, and to provide the best service available anywhere, we must raise our service rates by 28% beginning May 1st.

Even with this increase, we only rise to a five on a ten-point industry price range scale.

Thanks for understanding. Questions,? Please call or email us. Of course, my staff and I thank you for your past and continued patronage. Some of you have been with us for over 40 years.