Category: Telephone Answering Service

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD

Many small business owners, including TAS owners, use the simple yet effective management style of “management by walking around.” They manage what they see. However, to be effective the manager must be physically present.

If the manager can’t be around on a regular basis, the results are often disastrous, producing either micromanagement or mismanagement that can thwart growth, hamper quality, and limit profitability.

Most TAS owners work hard to grow their business. Regardless of their management style, this growth is generally workable when it occurs under the same roof. However, problems can crop up when a single location TAS adds a second site or acquires a geographically removed competitor.

Management by walking around works great for an active owner in one location, but not two or more. It’s impossible to successfully use management by walking around for multiple sites.

Only the location where the manager is present will be “managed,” with other locations left to themselves. This is especially true for service businesses such as answering services.

The solution is simple, albeit difficult. Quite simply a change in management style is required. Either the owner must adapt to a new way of doing things or find someone else who can – and then give him or her space to do the job.

However, this often is uncomfortable for an entrepreneur used to putting his or her mark on everything that happens and making all the decisions. Such is the challenge of growing a business!

Learn more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s book, How to Start a Telephone Answering Service.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of TAS Trader, covering the telephone answering service industry. Check out his books How to Start a Telephone Answering Service and Sticky Customer Service.

By Peter LyleDeHaan, PhD

The majority of family businesses aren’t successfully transferred to the second generation, and only about 15 percent make it to the third. There are many theories why.

A likely factor is that the second generation, who didn’t sacrifice to launch the business and see it through the lean, early years, lacks the resilience to persevere. Another reason is that problems occur if parents hand the business over too quickly to adult children who still lack experience.

Some entrepreneurial parents attempt to avoid these problems by making their successor children start at an entry-level position and work their way up the organization.

But this fast-track status often backfires, causing resentment from non-relative staff who may be more qualified, better educated, or have longer tenure.

To circumvent this, some founders require their children to earn a college degree and put in time at another firm to learn essential skills before joining the family business. Although this approach offers the greatest chance for success, it’s not a sure-fire strategy.

Regardless, if your goal is to pass your TAS to your children, be intentional about it and plan.

Don’t leave the business succession to chance, or you may end up like the majority of family-owned businesses that fail to successfully pass the baton to the kids.

Learn more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s book, How to Start a Telephone Answering Service.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of TAS Trader, covering the telephone answering service industry. Check out his books How to Start a Telephone Answering Service and Sticky Customer Service.

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD

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 to be straightforward, the path is less clear today. Not only are TASs more complex to run from a technical, legal and business standpoint, they’re also bigger.

Learning the answering service business from the ground up is a perennial prerequisite in preparing the next generation.

Having a college degree was once an optional bonus, but it is more critical now, as running an answering service has become more complicated with additional layers to comprehend. Another common stipulation is to first work outside the industry before joining the family business.

This gives the future leader a better understanding of business and added a background to provide a more balanced perspective. It’s also wise to study other multi-generational family businesses to learn the pitfalls and challenges of succession.

Lastly, while each decade has presented its share of threats to the TAS industry, there seems to be more now than ever before. Being ready to deal with these challenges requires even more preparation, as well as fortitude.

As long as the next generation receives all the training needed to continue the legacy, a TAS is still a great business to own and operate, especially when it’s the family business.

Learn more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s book, How to Start a Telephone Answering Service.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of TAS Trader, covering the telephone answering service industry. Check out his books How to Start a Telephone Answering Service and Sticky Customer Service.

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 to handle text messaging will occur by default when text-enabled Frontier customers sign up for an answering service. Another opportunity resides with Frontier customers who feel pressured by their customers to accept text messages but aren’t prepared to receive and respond to those messages.

The reasons could be many: a lack of the needed technological infrastructure, not enough staff, a desire to focus on other activities deemed more important, unable or unwilling staff, or the perception that texting is a distraction.

Regardless of the motivation, answering services can screen, respond to, and reroute text messages, just as they do with phone calls now.

Of course, working out the technical details of interfacing telco texting services is another issue, but it should be relatively easy to figure out on newer, Web-enabled systems. While this opportunity may not be a good fit for every TAS, it is worth considering.

Learn more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s book, How to Start a Telephone Answering Service.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of TAS Trader, covering the telephone answering service industry. Check out his books How to Start a Telephone Answering Service and Sticky Customer Service.

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, a new start, and new friends. It also means saying good-bye to the present and to longtime friends.

We’ve only moved our household a handful of times. What I’ve experienced more frequently is moving a TAS; I’ve lost track of how many. For my company, sometimes the moves were the result of an acquisition, while others were to a new facility.

Often I’d be involved in every aspect: preparing the facility, scheduling staff, ordering telco services, communicating with clients, forming an action plan, physically transporting equipment and furniture, and cutting over – ideally all without any downtime.

Of course, this takes a team of qualified employees to pull off, and I was fortunate to be surrounded by some truly great people.

As a consultant, sometimes I focused just on the technical aspect of the move. Other times I merely developed the plan, with other people to carry it out.

Moving a TAS is intense. There is diligent planning, careful preparation, long hours of work, possibly a night without sleep, lots of pressure, and often the need to respond to the unexpected at the worst possible moment.

Yet when the move is complete and call processing has returned to normal, there’s time to take a break, survey the situation, and realize it was all worth it.

May I say the same about our move in a few weeks!

Learn more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s book, How to Start a Telephone Answering Service.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of TAS Trader, covering the telephone answering service industry. Check out his books How to Start a Telephone Answering Service and Sticky Customer Service.

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 it – or at least the strong team I had made it look that way. I still relish our dozen-plus transactions: the search, the dialogue, the offer, closing the deal, planning the transition, overcoming problems, and realizing the results. I miss it.

Conversely is my feeling about sales and marketing. I’m not wired that way. Although awkward at it, I have a decent closing ratio in sales. However, selling sucks the life out of me, so I avoid it whenever possible. If my livelihood depended on sales, I’d surely starve.

Parallel to sales is marketing. To increase my marketing knowledge, I’ve attended seminars, gone to workshops, and taken graduate and post-graduate classes. I’ve amassed much marketing theory but had trouble successfully transferring it to real-world situations.

My marketing efforts required much time and produced little results. Of course, this is no wonder since I dislike marketing almost as much as sales.

Not surprisingly, under my leadership, the TAS grew mostly by acquisition and not much by sales and marketing.

From this, I’ve learned two things: if you have a strength, go with it; if you have a weakness, work to improve it.

With all this in mind, check out our monthly webinars to help your TAS grow through marketing.

Learn more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s book, How to Start a Telephone Answering Service.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of TAS Trader, covering the telephone answering service industry. Check out his books How to Start a Telephone Answering Service and Sticky Customer Service.

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 a great time, and the weekend would be even better, but not in the midst of the busiest day of the week.

Then I realized the true meaning of her words: “The system’s down.”

I remember in the early 80s, switching from cardboards to a computerized TAS system. This was in the early days of computers, before many businesses had them and before many PCs existed.

On occasion, we needed to tell clients the system was down. They reacted strongly to that, especially given the relative stability of cardboards and the accessibility of handwritten messages.

However, as more businesses installed computers and more people brought PCs into their home, the concept of a down computer became understood – and accepted.

I’ve heard the “doing an update” excuse a lot recently, but it’s been years since I heard “The system’s down.” I guess the euphemism of an “update” is less jarring than “We’re down.” An update sounds planned; a down system isn’t.

However, as much of the industry migrates to cloud-based solutions with monitored data centers, redundancy, backups, and controlled upgrades, the chance of being down or caught in the midst of an update decreases dramatically.

The new threat becomes a lost Internet connection. But I’m not sure what reason call centers will give for that problem, because if they also use VoIP, they won’t be able to tell callers anything.

Learn more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s book, How to Start a Telephone Answering Service.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of TAS Trader, covering the telephone answering service industry. Check out his books How to Start a Telephone Answering Service and Sticky Customer Service.

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 for lower temperatures and blankets of white adorning our landscape.

Finally, signs of winter’s retreat are emerging. Despite a dusting of snow over the weekend, the daytime temperatures are now mostly above freezing, and the stockpiles of snow are disappearing. Now, at last, I feel it’s safe to reminisce.

One December several years ago, I made an offhand comment to some of the answering service staff: “What we need is a good snowstorm to drive up call volume and pull us together.” A few weeks later, my wish came through – and then some.

Over the New Year’s weekend, it snowed and snowed…and snowed: fifty-two inches over a five-day period. Call volume shot up – higher than ever before – and stayed there. At the peak, we were getting one call every second, not that we could answer them all.

Our staff pulled together, doing far more than I could ever ask: working double shifts, sleeping at the office, skipping breaks, and cutting meals short. I even took calls – at least the easy ones I couldn’t mess up.

When it was over, we all had war stories to share. Overtime had jumped, but billing increased even more. Overall the result was good, but I never want to repeat it.

In all my adult life, that was the first and last time I wished for snow.

Learn more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s book, How to Start a Telephone Answering Service.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of TAS Trader, covering the telephone answering service industry. Check out his books How to Start a Telephone Answering Service and Sticky Customer Service.

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 that change was both timely and warranted, I wondered how you, our readers, would react. I’m pleased to report reader engagement (based on open and click stats, as well as reader comments) is even higher than before.

That’s sweet confirmation that we made this change correctly and you appreciated it.

Thank you for the affirmation and your encouraging support of TAS Trader. We are here to serve you and will continue to do so.

Learn more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s book, How to Start a Telephone Answering Service.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of TAS Trader, covering the telephone answering service industry. Check out his books How to Start a Telephone Answering Service and Sticky Customer Service.

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.

Sales and Marketing

allows for controlled expansion at a steady and manageable rate, without taxing staff or infrastructure. This requires no extra stress or additional work, and other projects aren’t put on hold.

Acquisition

provides a nice jump in size all at once. A team spirit develops as the staff pulls together to integrate the new accounts or another location into an existing operation. The effort is intense, and then things return to normal.

Considering which method best fits your goals is a great place to start. However, don’t overlook your own strengths. I always desired the methodical predictability of the sales and marketing approach, yet I had trouble finding the right sales staff and managing them to succeed.

What I was good at was acquisitions: the pursuit of the deal, the negotiation, and the integration afterwards.

Both growth options are legitimate considerations, but don’t do what everyone else is doing; pick the option that works best for you and your staff.

Learn more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s book, How to Start a Telephone Answering Service.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of TAS Trader, covering the telephone answering service industry. Check out his books How to Start a Telephone Answering Service and Sticky Customer Service.