Category: Telephone Answering Service

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD

Do you set annual goals for yourself or your business? I think everyone should. I don’t mean the New Year’s resolution type of wishful thinking, but a strategic plan for the upcoming year.

When you set goals for your answering service for the next twelve months, what do they look like? Are your goals along the lines of surviving, of hunkering down and getting by? Or are your goals forward-thinking and growth-oriented?

Put another way, is your cup for 2016 half-empty or half-full?

I see similarities between my industry (publishing) and yours (telephone answering service). Both are experiencing rapid changes and an uncertain future. With both, we have ample reason to worry and fret. Yet with these changes comes opportunity.

These opportunities are a reason to celebrate. I need to remind myself of this as much as I feel I should encourage you to do the same.

We have much we can look forward to in the New Year. And even if we can’t see the end clearly, may we move forward with bold confidence to pursue it.

Having something to look forward to is the surest way to realize it.

Happy New Year!

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 it’s not my intention to relabel the answering service industry, it is my goal to redefine it to better understand the potential that exists. Instead of calling yourself an answering service, let’s adopt the mindset that we are “information processors.” So stop thinking calls and start thinking communication.

Yes, we will still make and receive calls (after all, that is “processing information”), but we can do so much more. Consider the Internet, which affects all areas of business, life, and human existence.

With email, social media, text chat, and online order assistance, do you know of any business that can keep up? How does this relate to being an answering service or more correctly, an information processor?

Email

Quite simply, everything you can do with a call, you should apply to email. Screen email, prioritize email, redirect email, answer email, and send email; you can fax a form, mail a brochure, or even call that person back.

Most every organization has at least one, probably more, general-purpose email addresses, such as sales@…, service@…, and info@… How quickly do they respond to these messages, if at all? Your answering service can handle these email addresses for your clients.

Text Chat

Your call center can become the centralized communication processor for all of your clients’ general text chat options: respond to questions, process information, forward requests, and so on.

Staff at many organizations already have too much expected of them. It simply isn’t an option to pile on one more thing. In addition, there’s no need to; you can handle this for them.

Order Assistance

Online retailers fret over abandoned shopping carts. With the right interface, an answering service can offer a 24/7 response to visitors’ questions who are viewing clients’ websites.

How do you proceed? Visit each of your client’s websites. Send an email to their generic email address. Note how long it takes them to respond. Do they have an option for text chat and “call me?” By now you should have several ideas of how you can better serve your clients.

The future of the telephone answering service industry may reside with the Internet more than the telephone. The opportunities are limited only by imagination and creativity.

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 doesn’t require much of a look at the telephone answering service industry to know that the number of answering services has been dramatically decreasing in recent years. While I don’t have an exact number and doubt that anyone does, I think everyone agrees that we have fewer players in our industry today than at any time in recent memory.

But this isn’t because the industry is in trouble. In fact, it’s just the opposite. Many business people and entrepreneurs see the opportunity to grow and make money. They are bullish about the industry. They believe in the idea of helping businesses by serving people over the phone.

These folks have been on a buying spree. Industry consolidation runs rampant. While this consolidation provides serious challenges for vendors and associations, as well as the publications that cover the industry, it does not spell doom for the industry as a whole.

Another thing we can’t verify is market size. Although the number of actual answering services is on the decline, I suspect the number of TAS customers is not. Even more so I speculate that the amount of revenue generated industrywide is on the upswing. Though I can’t prove it quantifiably, I sense that it must be true.

I don’t think the TAS market is shrinking. It’s just changing, and we need to change with 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.

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD

By classification, a telephone answering service is a call center, a centralized place from where calls are made and received. Yet many of today’s call centers are neither! They are not centralized, nor do they deal with just calls.

The label contact center more accurately reflects the current reality of many operations: handling various forms of contact, including phone calls. Even so, this doesn’t address the reality that call centers are increasingly not centralized, but dispersed, with multiple locations and even home-based operators.

While a centralized telephone answering service is easier to manage and operate, decentralization offers numerous benefits. A key reason to decentralize is to tap new labor markets.

After all, it’s hard to expand when qualified workers are in short supply. Opening a second location near where workers live makes a lot of sense.

A second reason is a redundancy. With two operations, each one can back up the other. If both are fully self-contained and interconnected they represent an elegant disaster recovery plan.

A third benefit is time-zone shifting. Imagine one location’s mid-afternoon lull meshing with another location’s 5 p.m. rush. Or what about a location in another part of the world whose first shift staff answers third shift calls for the United States?

Last, consider a completely decentralized answering service with every agent working from home. This broadens the labor pool, even more, provides the greatest flexibility and can reduce or even eliminate real estate costs.

True, a decentralized answering service isn’t for everyone, but it does offer some intriguing possibilities.

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 is nothing wrong with being a generalist, but if you are a broad-based telephone answering service, you might decide to grow your business by pursuing strategic niches. But how do you determine which niches to pursue?

Look at the types of accounts you currently handle. Do you see any trends or groups? Poll your staff. Ask them which accounts they like and why. Also consider items such as profitability, customer service needs, and payment history.

These factors often vary by industry or subgroup. If so, they should be easy to identify.

Ideally, you want to pursue a niche that you are already good at, you have proven yourself in, your staff enjoys and serves well, can be charged profitable fees, doesn’t overtax your support team, and pays on time.

It is unlikely to find a market segment that matches all these goals, but seek to match as many items as possible.

Pursuing a niche, however, is “putting all your eggs in one basket.” If that niche experiences a downturn, so will you. The key is to develop multiple niches. After you establish yourself in one niche, pursue a second and then a third.

How many niches to pursue? You need at least three. That way if one niche tanks, you have the other two to prop up your answering service and maintain some degree of stability.

Of course, this assumes each niche represents an equal portion of the business. A general guide is that it is unwise to derive more than half of your business from any one industry or market.

When pursued strategically, niches can provide a means for growth and stability.

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’ve never seen an answering service that didn’t have seasonal traffic fluctuations. Most experience an increase in the summer months. This is likely a result of vacations at their clients’ offices and those clients using the answering service more.

Or maybe they are on summer hours or more of their customers call after hours – such as for A/C problems. Whatever the reason, the result is more calls into the TAS and increased billing during the dog days of summer: July and August.

This also means a corresponding jump in payroll to handle the extra calls. (If traffic increases and you don’t need to add hours to your schedule, then you were overstaffed to begin with.)

The key to appropriately adjusting the schedule is anticipating the need to add hours or staff in advance, not reacting to the changed traffic afterwards. When reacting, the ideal schedule typically lags the actual need by a week or two – or even more.

This happens both when ramping up to meet increased demand and scaling back in response to decreased traffic. On the frontend this causes understaffing and results in a drop in service quality. On the backend this causes overstaffing and a drop in profitability.

That’s another reason why we might dread the dog days of summer.

Seasoned managers and schedulers can tap into their experience of past summers and intuitively make the right adjustments at the right time. This is an art.

Short of having this ability, or to be even more precise, workforce management (WFM) tools can supplement the art of scheduling with the science of scheduling.

Either way, the schedule moves with traffic changes and the billing tracks with labor costs. Service levels remain consistent and clients have no added reason to complain. Then the dog days of summer aren’t so bad after all.

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 United States we celebrated a holiday a few days ago. Though the official date was on Saturday, most businesses closed on Friday to give their staff a three-day weekend. A few tacked on Monday as well, giving their employees even more time off.

Telephone answering services (TAS) aren’t able to do that. Most answering services need to schedule more staff to take extra calls for all their clients that are closed.

The reality is that in the TAS industry, a holiday is a workday, often a busy one. For TAS staff, their holiday celebrations often need to happen earlier or wait until later.

Many answering services pay their staff extra to work on holidays: time and a half, double time, or even more. Some do it because they need to, while others pay more because they feel it’s fair.

The agent benefits financially for the inconvenience of working while most other people have the day off for celebration and time with family and friends.

This extra pay increases the operating costs of the TAS. Hopefully extra billing will result from the jump in call volume, enough to offset the additional payroll.

So when I ask someone in the answering service industry, “How was your holiday?” what I often mean is “Did you have to work?” “How busy was it?” and “Did your extra billing cover your increased labor costs?”

Regardless, I hope your holiday was a good one.

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 used to be that telephone answering services (TAS) could function as a generalist – serving all clients – or specialize in specific niches. I now wonder if a niche strategy might be needed in today’s marketplace.

A huge answering service niche is the healthcare industry. Within this focus, there are sub-niches, such as medical answering service, hospital console, telephone triage, physician referral, appointment setting and verification, pharmaceutical support, patient follow-up, clinical trials, and so on.

Other examples of niches for answering services to consider include property management or transportation. There are also regional opportunities, such as with the logging, shipping, oil and natural gas, farming, tourist, or entertainment industries.

The niche a telephone answering service elects to pursue should hinge on the size of that market and the answering service’s connection and affinity with that market. Never pursue a promising niche if your company lacks experience serving it or if it bores you.

Developing services specifically geared towards a particular industry establishes expertise and increases proficiency that is unobtainable by a generalist answering service. Increased efficiencies will result. This provides the option to charge less, improve profitability, or both.

Pursuing a niche, however, is akin to the adage of “putting all your eggs in one basket.” The key is to diversify by developing multiple niches. After establishing yourself in one niche, pursue a second, and then add a third.

In most cases, three niches are a minimal number. This keeps an economic downturn in one niche from financially devastating to your TAS. However, if you have too many niches, the risk is diluting your focus and becoming a generalist.

Only you can decide if a niche strategy is right for your answering service. But if it is, be intentional and then diversify.

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

Since its beginning, every year brings changes to the telephone answering service (TAS) industry. And the scope of change seems to increase each year. However, not everything changes. Some things stay the same.

Though these four keys may fluctuate in importance from year to year, they are always at the forefront of our efforts to provide answering services to organizations and individuals.

Timely Communication

We exist because there is a need to respond quickly: to answer the phone as soon as possible and provide information to our clients when and how they need it.

Professional Service

We are representatives of every client; they expect us to be professional. In many cases, we are their public face, be it part of the time or all of the time.

Personal Touch

A decade ago or so, the need for personal touch fell into question in some circles. Self-service and automation would surely prevail. That didn’t work out so well; a backlash occurred. When self-service and automation fail, people are the answer; that means us.

Cost-Effectiveness

Although TASs vary in their billing strategies from low-cost providers to premium boutiques, the common factor is that our service must be cost-effective when compared to other options. If we cease to be cost-effective, the first three items don’t matter.

Yes, there are changes afoot, ranging from technology to staffing to legal to financial, but what remains is our four keys: timely communication, professional service, personal touch, and cost-effectiveness.

May we never lose sight of them.

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 problem faced by telephone answering service owners (like all business owners) is addressing life cycle changes: dealing with shifting priorities as we age.

While some people may have both the drive and ability to run a business for the remainder of their lives, most get to a point where they want to scale back: not handling day-to-day issues, taking longer vacations, semi-retiring, or not working at all.

These are all various forms of letting go. Yet letting go is often hard for someone who sacrificed to launch or grow a business. As a longtime owner, you may make every key decision and oversee all activities.

If there is a family member or key employee interested in taking over the business, this may be the best solution to help you achieve your goals, providing there is enough time to make an orderly transition.

Alternatively, adopting a new management style is another option. However, many TAS owners find themselves in a position where their kids don’t want the business and they can’t change their management style, so they opt for the only other solution – they sell the business.

Whatever path you choose, the key is to carefully consider all the options and make an informed decision after taking the time to make the best choice for your situation. Whatever you do, don’t put things off and then be forced to make a rash decision.

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.