Category: Telephone Answering Service

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD

Long ago, perhaps in graduate school, I read a management guru who advocated that a company’s highest-paid employee should ethically make no more than seven times the lowest-paid employee. Of course, I can’t find that source now, but I remember it well.

For a telephone answering service, the two people at opposite ends of the wage scale are the owner/president/CEO and an entry-level operator. With the federal minimum wage in the United States currently at $7.25 per hour – and yes, there are sadly some answering services that still pay minimum wage – that projects to a top annual salary of around $105,000 a year. Of course, it doesn’t need to be that high, but it can be.

How close does your answering service come to meeting this paradigm of no more than a seven-fold wage differential? Maybe it’s time to re-examine pay rates: decrease yours, increase theirs, or do both.

While I’ve met TAS owners who barely scraped by, some effectively making less than minimum wage for their endless hours of work, I think those players have all left the industry, either due to the sale of their business or its closure. Left are the viable players, the serious business people who run great organizations and enjoy success. Many of them work diligently to maximize their paycheck, while at the same time remaining convinced they must pay their front-line staff as little as possible. “It’s the economics of the industry,” they say.

I don’t agree.

What happens when the minimum wage goes up? Some states and cities already have, and answering services in those areas has adjusted to a higher starting wage. With talk of $12 to $15 dollars an hour, the low-paying answering services will be forced to make changes, too, or go out of business.

Get ahead of what is bound to come. Start increasing what you pay your answering service operators. But here’s a hint: Don’t pay more for the same caliber of employee. Pay more and expect more. Everyone wins.

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 recently read a fiction book set in the late nineties. In a small but pivotal part of the story stood a telephone answering service. The author was mostly accurate in describing how an answering service functions, though his depiction of the industry highlighted several negative stereotypes as the norm.

The FBI investigated one of the answering service’s clients, a professional assassin. They laid out two options to the answering service’s owner: cooperate with us and we will ignore your involvement in your customer’s crime or don’t cooperate and be charged as an accessory to murder, over two dozen of them, and risk spending the rest of your life in jail.

The owner decided to cooperate. Though she had never met the man who signed up for the service or the woman who they contacted with messages, the owner did admit she thought something was suspicious. She assumed her client was involved in some low-level fraud, but nothing to the level of a hitman. Since they paid their bill every month, quickly and reliably, she was willing to ignore whatever business they might be in.

A few days later, her client – the hitman – paid her a visit. The gist of the conversation, aided by the threatening presence of a handgun, was if you tell the FBI who I am, my associates or I will kill you.

Talk about a no-win situation.

This story, of course, is a work of fiction. But I share this scenario because I know that – despite the majority of answering services who would carefully avoid such a client – some services will take any client who can pay his or her bill. Maybe it’s time to rethink that strategy.

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

As I talk with owners and operators in the telephone answering service industry, some have concerns and others share the excitement. I understand those who are pessimistic. After all, there is much to worry about. I also understand those who are optimistic. They see ongoing changes to the industry, as well as threats from within and without, as occasions to celebrate.

These folks have figured out how to market and to sell, not just to offset attrition but to grow organically. Others embrace acquisition, either for the art of the deal or as a means to pick up new clients from acquisitions who fail their newly acquired clients.

Still, others have figured out how to manage staff successfully across multiple locations or to truly scale their business in a way that works in actual practice. Last are those who manage what they have with excellence: maximizing value, thrilling clients, engaging staff, and making a nice profit in the process.

Regardless of which camp you are in, the half-full contingent or the half-empty group, now is a great time to begin preparing for next year. Don’t wait until December 31 to begin your strategic plan for the new year. And whatever you do, don’t confront the upcoming year without a plan.

• Look at what you do well and ask how you can do it better. Every TAS has at least one thing they do with excellence. Don’t lose sight of that.
• Then look at where you struggle and seek ways to turn it into a strength. Every TAS also has at least one thing they can do better. Don’t think otherwise.
• Last look at your biggest pain point and make a plan so it hurts a little less. You can do that.

Do these three things and make next year your best one yet. Start preparing today.

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

Having bought more than a dozen answering services in my day, I understand the allure of chasing the sale, negotiating fair terms, closing the deal, and taking control of the acquisition. Yet the real value comes after the sale when the acquired accounts are optimized.

Yes, you inevitably lose some, no matter how careful the transition, but the ones that remain are profitable and grow your bottom line. Even though this post-sale optimization is a critical final step, it’s not nearly as exciting as pursuing the deal. But it is more important. Critically so.

Maximizing the value of a newly acquired property requires hard work, takes time, and receives little recognition. But when successful, the results pay off month after month.

Some answering services excel in deal-making but flounder at exploiting the potential of their purchase. As a result, they churn the accounts they just bought. While a few of those clients will stop using answering services altogether, a majority will move on to another answering service. And that’s good news for everyone else in the industry.

Each acquisition prompts some clients to look for a new service. In some cases, many accounts will want to jump ship. This means an opportunity for the rest of the industry.

Look for ways to make it easy for these businesses to switch to your answering service. Speed and ease of transition is critical. They are in pain and want to move. Make it effortless, and they will choose you.

This is the upside to the dark side of acquisitions.

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

A couple of years ago I started offering freelance commercial writing services. Not surprisingly, much of the work I do is in the answering service industry: commercial marketing, blog posts, website content, and marketing materials.

As I research and write for my clients in the TAS industry, one theme reoccurs. I am struck with the realization that there is a great opportunity ahead of us. Though these opportunities aren’t readily apparent, they do exist. It takes visionary leaders willing to try new things. Some initiatives fail and some succeed. We learn from failure and build upon success.

These opportunities often mix great staff with exciting technology to spark creative service offerings. And of course, promotion and marketing are now more critical than ever.

Ours is a resilient industry. Yes, it is changing. Consolidation continues. Our vendors innovate like never before, producing technology that provides us the means to offer exciting new services. Clients expect more and that helps us get better.

The bad players are being bought out or go out of business. The good players compete and grow and make money.

While there may be less answering services to do the work, I believe there is more business awaiting us than ever before.

I am so excited about the future of the TAS industry, and I hope you are, too.

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

Many years ago in another industry, my boss shared his grand suggestion to save money and boost productivity. It was insightful but had a critical flaw that would render it unworkable. He was enough removed from the day-to-day workings of our operation that he was unaware of the hole in his logic.

As the TAS industry continues to consolidate, investment comes from the outside. These folks have their own grand ideas of how they will save money and boost productivity. Most of the time they are wrong. Their ideas are not realistic and may not even be feasible, but they lack the intimate, practical, day-to-day knowledge to realize that.

Notice I said “most of the time.” This means that occasionally outsiders bring a truly innovative idea into the TAS industry. But if we’re not careful we will dismiss it as being ill-conceived, despite their good intentions.

The key is to keep an open mind, to not hold our time-proven SOP (standard operating procedure) as sacrosanct. This is easier to say than to do.

But just because we’ve always done something a certain way, doesn’t mean we can’t find a better method to do it, a means to save money or boost productivity. So we must respectfully consider an outsider’s plan to change our ways – they just may be right.

However, those on the outside looking in must balance their great ideas with the seasoned pragmatism of insiders. After all, most of the time we will be right.

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

It seems that subscription services surround us: from Dollar Shave Club to HP Instant Ink, to Microsoft 365. For the record, I’ve passed on all three, though I recently questioned that decision as I made another trip to the office supply store to purchase printer ink.

Nonprofits also embrace this approach, preferring ongoing, automatic monthly donations, in lieu of chasing larger annual contributions. Rather than fight their paradigm, I have acquiesced to their new method of fund-raising.

The telephone answering service industry may have been the first to stumble unto this idea of monthly reoccurring revenue when it emerged some ninety years ago. I understand they followed a flat-rate billing model then, which fully exemplifies this concept. (I discount magazine subscriptions from this discussion because they bill annually, not monthly.)

Ten years ago, I first heard about the subscription model being offered by a TAS vendor. I immediately saw the brilliance of their plan. Assuming their cash flow could tolerate a transition from large system sales to reoccurring monthly revenue, they would position themselves well for the future, helping to ensure their ongoing viability.

This software subscription service is commonly called hosted solutions or SaaS (software as a service). While some claim distinctions between the two, they are essentially the same model. The concept also once went by ASP (application service provider), though that acronym now means something else.

As I said, this plan is brilliant – for the vendors. What took me longer to comprehend was that this makes sense for the answering services, too. As one firmly entrenched in the buy-once-and-use-it-forever perspective, I dislike the idea of paying a small fee every month.

Yet as I learn more about the TAS platform subscription model, I see it makes sense for answering services, too. This is especially true for startups and small to medium answering services, as well as larger ones.

Although I’ll stop short of saying that the subscription service model is right for all answering services to acquire their technology, I do assert that all answering services should look into it. The possible benefits are too big to ignore.

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

Having a professional website is essential for any telephone answering service that wants to grow. The emphasis is on the word professional. Though collectively our industry websites are much better than a decade ago, too many TAS websites still aren’t professional looking or professional sounding.

Here’s how to develop a professional website for your answering service:

1) Clarify Your Brand

Before you do anything with your website, you need a clear, strong brand. This includes the overall image you want to project and the supporting materials, including logo, color palette, tag line, mission, and so forth.

2) Decide Who You Are

You must also determine if you will brand yourself as an answering service, a call center, a contact center, a BPO (business process outsourcer), or something else. If you pick multiple answers, seriously consider a separate website for each one. They can look similar and even duplicate some content, but they each need a separate website and domain name.

3) Establish Goals

What goals do you want your website to accomplish? It can be an online brochure to support your sales team, a means to capture leads, a way to order online, or some other goal.

4) Hire an Experienced Website Developer

With your brand, identity, and goals established, now hire a professional website designer. Though they could produce your logo and determine your color palate, if you don’t have all these other elements firmly in place before you call them, expect to pay two or three times as much for them to help you work through these decisions. Also ask them to use WordPress. I’m biased here, but one quarter of the websites worldwide use WordPress. It’s open-source, has a great online support community, and there are scads of developers to step in if needed (in case your developer disappears, which happens too often). Plus, if you want to, you can make simple changes yourself.

5) Don’t Survey Other TAS Sites

Don’t look at other TAS websites for ideas. Seriously. Instead, look at the successful websites in other professional service organizations. You don’t want to look like other TAS websites; you want to look better than other TAS websites. You have to look outside the industry to do so. Tell your designer which ones you like and why.

6) Hire a Writer

Your developer could write your content or you could do it yourself, but the likely outcome is you will end up sounding like everyone else in the TAS industry. Hire a professional freelance writer or journalist to interview you and write the content. Your website developer may have recommendations for who to contact.

7) Hit Refresh Every Couple of Years

In looking at TAS websites, I see a few that were great websites – ten or fifteen years ago. Now they merely look dated and imply the same about the company. Plan to update yours about every two to three years. If you like your developer and stay with them, the refresh shouldn’t cost as much as the first version – unless you wait too long before doing the update.

Having a professional website is critical to helping your answering service grow. It is your first step to a better tomorrow.

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 recently talked with a lady who had sold her answering service and was now getting back into the business. My first thought was to congratulate her, but I know from experience that celebration might not be in order. Indeed I have talked with too many who were forced back into the industry when some aspect of their sale fell through, such as not receiving their monthly payments. Once out, some people don’t want to go back.

Yet others miss the industry and return as soon as their non-compete clauses are up. Fortunately, in this case, the woman wanted to get back into the answering service business. Once I confirmed this, I congratulated her and wished her the best. I’m excited for her.

Though I didn’t ask for details, I see three options for her to consider:

Start From Scratch

Starting an answering service with no clients is challenging. Yes, I know many people have done exactly that over the years, but that doesn’t make it any easier. The key to this is getting as many clients as quickly as possible. Otherwise, you have staff sitting around with little to do and expecting a paycheck, but you don’t have enough revenue coming in to pay them.

Buy an Existing TAS

An alternative is to buy an existing operation. Buying a going concern solves startup and initial cash flow concerns, but it is a sellers’ market so finding a service to buy for a good price is a challenge.

Return to Your Former Business

A third option is to rejoin the service you just sold. It could be you buy an equity stake or that you return as an employee. Both options have their drawbacks. Your new role will be different from your former one, the operation will have changed, and the staff will have turned over. As the saying goes, you can’t go back home.

So I’ve given three options to return to the answering service industry, and all three have serious downsides. Maybe the key is to make sure you really want out before you sell – because it’s hard to go back

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 reviewing my past five columns in TAS Trader I see a trend in what I’ve written. I can best summarize this theme as embracing change. Indeed I wrote about looking forward to the new year, re-envisioning ourselves as information processors, asking is our industry shrinking, looking at our changing industry, and pursuing a niche strategy. That’s a lot of words about change, all because we are confronted with a pressing need to change.

While certainly a concern, change is nothing new to our industry. Change has always been a part of the telephone answering service landscape, especially since the introduction of computerized answering systems, circa 1980.

We’ve always had things to worry about, transitions to navigate, and technology to master. Change permeates our thoughts, our informal discussions, our industry meetings, and the things we write about.

We can have two responses to these ever-present changes.

One approach is to resist them. We can seek to maintain the status quo. We can lament about the good old days. We can even try to convince ourselves that things will get better if we just stay the course.

The other approach is to embrace change. We can see change as an opportunity. As technology evolves our prospects for growth and improvement follow closely along. The opening is there for us if we will but take it.

The challenge is to see change as an opportunity in disguise and then figure out a way to grab hold of it to seize the potential that it presents.

Change is normal; so embrace it.

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.