Why Centratel?

Because you may be price shopping, and neither of us wants to waste your time, it is important that you know that our rates are sometimes higher than other answering services. I can’t imagine advertising that “we have the lowest rates and the highest quality!” That’s simply impossible. A telephone answering service that is charging low rates can’t possibly pay Telephone Service Representatives (TSR’s: the people who handle the calls and by far the largest operating cost of any telephone answering service), much more than minimum wage. In any business, minimum wage pay equals less qualified people and chronic staff turnover. How could low pay possibly equate with high quality?

Processing incoming answering service calls is tough work, demanding a rare combination of brains, finesse, tenacity, mastery of the English language as well as an engaging and resilient comportment. Quality can’t happen when the people who take the calls and deliver the messages don’t stay in the position long-term.

So, Centratel doesn’t play the low cost/low pay game. Our quality is the highest available anywhere because we hire good people and then keep those people long-term. This means we can’t, and won’t, be part of the endemic telephone answering service industry price-war game. By being up-front about our sometimes higher rates (emphasis on (“sometimes”), I offer you a congruent message: Our high quality is supported by believable, tangible evidence, not by “we care more so we’re the best” promises that could not possibly be kept.

It’s true: One “gets what one pays for.” At Centratel, our market is the telephone answering service customer who is truly interested in quality first.

We do more than pay our people well: We also have independent quality control and customer service departments, our documented system protocols mean zero-defect efficiency and we use the most sophisticated and reliable equipment available.

We don’t ask for a long-term commitment. If the service we provide is not adequate, or things change within the client’s business, the customer should be free to cease service quickly. We ask for only a seven day notice. There is a simple Terms of Service acknowledgment that we ask our new clients to sign. We don’t ask for an up-front security deposit.

Unlike most telephone answering services, Centratel limits service to a small and specific group of businesses and professions. Focused and knowledgeable, we’re expert in specific categories of business. If your business or profession is within one of these categories, our expertise will allow us to seamlessly fit into your operation, providing no-nonsense, high quality telephone answering service that precisely meets your needs. And what exactly do we do for our clients? Here are some case studies.

Our roots are in medical telephone answering service with some clinics using Centratel for close to four decades. By serving hundreds of medical answering service clients, super-high quality standards are automatically set for our other business categories. There is little room for error when handling medical emergencies. We also serve scores of veterinary offices across the nation, each requiring the same intense quality of message processing as medical accounts. In addition, we serve scores of home health and hospice accounts. Funeral homes constitute a special market in which our telephone service representatives must handle calls with special empathy. Again, the high standard necessary to handle these critical calls naturally extends to all other business clients.

In the early 1980’s I managed a family run publishing business here in Bend, Oregon. Over those four years we used all three local answering services twice each, unsuccessfully searching for solid quality. We needed both regular office hours answering service and after-hours answering service…and the quality we received was terrible. In December of 1984, in frustration, and simultaneously seeing an opportunity, I bought one of the smaller local services and proceeded with a single premise that was based on our own bitter experience as telephone answering service customers: “Certainly there are business owners who will be willing to pay more for truly superb answering service quality. This will provide Centratel a higher income. The higher income will be routed directly back to answering staff who will be paid according to their individual and group performance. All this will be supported within an organization that is near flawless in its efficiency.” It’s a simple formula and we’ve stuck with it since the beginning and, within our industry of eight hundred answering services nationwide, it’s a formula that has been a big part of placing Centratel within a very, very small circle of elite quality national telephone answering services.

Our growth has been due almost entirely to new accounts that come to us because they were searching for better service quality. At the risk of denigrating my own industry, it is my opinion that quality problems have always been, and continue to be, chronic to the telephone answering service industry. It’s easy to understand why: This is a complex business and there is much that can go wrong. In most services, owners and managers spend their days killing fires and not managing the systems that are creating those fires. Thus, there is poor service to clients.

This website is open to everyone, including other telephone answering services. But I’m not concerned about revealing secrets of our success to answering service competitors because the principles we use take substantial additional monetary and elbow-grease investment. For example, Centratel TSR wages are much, much higher than industry standards. Also, we use a meticulously organized and executed management process including two distinctly independent departments: One geared exclusively to answering quality, and the other focusing on customer services. It’s not easy! How we do what we do is difficult to put into practice and requires substantial initial and ongoing investment.

Still with me? Here are the reasons why Centratel offers the highest quality anywhere:

1. This telephone answering service business is an incredibly complex “system of systems,” and if there is to be exceptional quality of service, the systems of the business must be meticulously managed, real-time: Documented principles, precise protocol, thoughtful methodology and honest self-evaluation are at the heart of how we operate. I list this point first because without thoroughly documented and systematic operational protocols, no matter what else a telephone answering service owner does right, there can’t be high quality of service. There are too many things that can go wrong. I am passionate about our culture of “never-ending system improvement,” as described in my book Work The System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less, now in its second printing of the fourth edition.
2. As mentioned previously, we specialize in only certain business categories. This means we are deeply experienced in just a few specialty vertical markets. Unlike 99% of competing telephone answering services, we don’t attempt to “be all things to all people.”
3. Our Telephone Service Representative (TSR) and customer service personnel are very well paid earning almost double industry standards, with up to 30% of their individual compensation keyed directly to their own personal performance. Every one of our staff members is a full-time, career professional. We don’t employ part-time staff as is common with most telephone answering services. There is very little staff turnover, with some TSR tenures approaching 25 years. Full-time career people who are well compensated (and rewarded for their own personal performance) are people who are very serious about what they do. The Centratel TSR’s performance is consistently superb. As a side-thought, it is interesting to note that the people who answer the phones, TSR’s, are very seldom mentioned in competitor web site advertising. Why is that? TSRs are clearly the heart of any telephone answering service’s quality. Whatever telephone answering service you employ, these are the individuals who talk to your customers or patients, often in urgent situations. Here is a link to our staff page.
4. Our principles of operation and system protocols are meticulously created, exactly documented and rigorously applied. Our staff knows what is expected and our clients know what to expect. There are no surprises and there is no fire-killing. The end result of this attention to detail: very few errors in an industry that is by nature, profoundly error-prone. As mentioned previously, 96% of Centratel’s current clients were with another answering service before they came to us, and virtually all of these clients had quality problems with that former provider.
5. Rigorous quality control: a distinct and independent department, with its own budget, is dedicated to Telephone Service Representative (TSR) quality control. On a weekly basis, a random sampling of each TSR’s calls are reviewed in detail. Every two weeks, each TSR meets with our Quality Team to review sampled messages, one-on-one. The review is tough, thorough and complex. These reviews are scored and with a high enough score, TSRs receive a significant monthly bonus, up to 30% of their previous month’s gross earnings.
6. Another separate and independent department, Customer Service, is focused on answering questions from clients, handling the rare problem that might arise, and routinely contacting clients to update account information. As with the rest of Centratel’s operation, key commonalities of these two departments are independence, intensity, documentation and point-of-sale response (in which any issue is handled NOW).
7. Drug testing is frequent and thorough. Centratel has a zero-tolerance policy on drug abuse. Without going into detail, trust that for a variety of reasons this is a very important issue for any telephone answering service. It’s incomprehensible to me, but most answering services do not drug test!
8. Our telecom and internal communications equipment and systems are cutting edge, offering the highest level of reliability and the widest selection of service options available anywhere. We employ three full-time career IT engineers.
9. Each of our clients has a message taking/message delivery protocol designed to meet their company’s exact needs.
10. If there is an error on our part, that error is a very big deal. We fix the problem immediately, analyze how the error occurred, and then do what we need to do so that error doesn’t happen again, including checking back with the client more than once.
11. Every call is recorded via Centratel’s integrated digital voice recording system. Any question about a particular call can be answered by a simple review of the caller-TSR dialog. Any message, including both sides of the conversation, can be delivered to the client via internet WAV file. Calls are kept on file for three years.