By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD Two common ways to grow a telephone answering service are through acquisitions and via sales and marketing. A third way is to provide additional services. With the announcement that Frontier will offer texting on business landlines, TASs will have the opportunity to offer more services. In some cases, the need […]
Tag: Peter Lyle DeHaan
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Memories of Moving
By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD My wife and I plan to move in a few weeks. The last time we moved was twenty-seven years ago, so the process of preparing, packing, and loading isn’t too fresh. Yet the enormity of the task has never left us and is now being reinforced. Moving represents new opportunities, […]
By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD I’ll admit it; I’m an idealist. I think life should be fair; everyone deserves equal opportunity. That’s why I favor impartiality when distributing calls in the call center, with each call handled in the order received and going to the next available operator: universal call distribution. However, we must remember […]
By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD There are just two ways to grow your telephone answering service. One is through sales and marketing; the other is via acquisitions. Any other strategy is merely a subset of one of these two methods (usually a variation on marketing). I enjoyed doing acquisitions. And I was quite good at […]
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The System’s Down
By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD On Monday I called a vendor about my invoice. “I’m sorry,” the rep said, “but we’re doing an update, and I can’t access your records.” Given that they only operate sixty hours a week, doing an update in the middle of the day was strange timing. The evening would be […]
By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD Last month I took a trip to the ER – as a patient. It was one of the silly things; I guess that’s why they call them accidents. A series of small decisions throughout my day resulted in a final “oops” at the wrong time and…well, I’ll spare you the […]
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Do You Like Snow?
By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD In Michigan, as well as in many other parts of the United States, winter has wearied everyone. It’s lasted too long, been too cold, and piled on too much snow. Everyone I talk to longs for this season to end. Even those who adore winter weather have ceased their praise […]
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Evaluating Change
By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD In the March issue of Medical Call Center News (check it out if you serve medical accounts), I wrote about implementing change in your operation. It reminded me of the change TAS Trader went through in January when we switched from a PDF format to an email format. Though making […]
By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD The first step to establish a change-oriented culture in your call center is to minimize employee fears about change. Employees can accept change if 1) the change is incremental or small; 2) they have a degree of input or control over the change; and 3) the change is clearly understood […]
By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD Although there are exceptions, most TAS owners want to grow their business. (Even those who want to keep the operation at its present size need to add new accounts to make up for cancellations.) To grow your TAS, there are but two ways: through sales and marketing or through acquisition. […]