I’m not sure how the telephone answering service industry compares with other industries, but there seem to be many second and third generations running the answering services their families started. (If you’re a fourth or fifth-generation owner, please let me know.) While the process of handing over ownership and control to the next generation used […]
Being farsighted and using a computer all day makes glasses a necessity. Imagine my dismay while cleaning my glasses when I heard a snap and a lens fell out. I arrived at my optometrist’s office as the doors opened. “Can you fix them?” I asked. The technician replied that, short of an eye exam, new […]
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 to handle text messaging will […]
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, a new start, and new […]
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 that, whether for profit or […]
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 it – or at least […]
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 a great time, and the […]
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 details. My wife drove while […]
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 for lower temperatures and blankets […]
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 that change was both timely […]