Why Centratel?

A message from Centratel President, Sam Carpenter
Updated 7/16/2008

Thank you for your interest in Centratel. There is a LOT of information in this site but it's my guess that if you are serious about finding a new telephone answering service, and if you take the time to really investigate, starting with the five minutes it takes to read this summary, Centratel will be your last stop. My staff and I have a single, primary goal: To provide you the highest quality telephone answering service in the United States. In this summary I will explain how we achieved that goal. You might also read my essay about the answering service industry. There you will find inside information about the industry that you won't find elsewhere.

Are you at this site because you are not satisfied with the quality of your current service? Know that you are not alone: The vast majority of Centratel's current clients have been with another answering service previously.

Note that we have clients in all 50 states. Only 20% of all of our approximately 900 clients are located here in Bend, Oregon, our center of operations for the past 24 years. Consider that the United States telephone switched network is awesomely reliable and your calls are handled toll-free: This makes Centratel as local to you as if our offices were located right in your town, just down the street from your small business or professional office.

Except for our testimonial page, I've personally written every word in this website and you will find that it is unique in its approach. It is designed to inform. My goal is to provide comprehensive and candid information about the telephone answering service industry and how Centratel operates. If you peruse other telephone answering service web sites, you'll find clever layouts, flashing lights and music, general sales-speak, photos of attractive operators with headsets and general assertions that "we care more" (as if that inane proclamation would somehow translate into superior quality).

We offer a 30-day free trial for our services. We do this because, statistically, it makes sense for us: Those businesses that try our answering service invariably stay with us. The largest chore has been to get the interested party to actually try the service and the 30-day free trial aids that effort well.

I've owned the majority share of this company since 1984. My previous background was engineering and publishing and my personal expertise is in system organizing and operational execution (I am, in fact, writing a book about this subject, to be published next month).

So, in your research, I recommend that at a minimum you read this letter in which I have encapsulated who we are and why we're different, and especially, the tangible reasons why we provide a quality of service that is unmatched anywhere.

We've included a search function for your convenience. If you are really the investigative type, check out my personal blog at www.centratel.com/blog, "Inside a Telephone Answering Service." When you are ready to contact us about service for your company or professional office, either call us at 1-800-664-7159 or reach us via the "Price Quote" page on this site.

Within this site you will find twelve basic questions that should be asked of a prospective telephone answering service.

Because you may be price shopping, and neither of us wants you to waste your time, it is important that you know that our rates are higher than the average telephone answering service. I can't imagine advertising "the lowest rates and the highest quality!" That's simply impossible. A telephone answering service that is charging low rates can't possibly pay Telephone Service Representatives -- the people who handle the calls and the largest cost of any telephone answering service -- much more than minimum wage. In any business, minimum wage pay equals less qualified people and chronic staff turnover. How could low pay possibly equate with high quality in a telephone answering service, where representatives are handling calls from the customers of literally hundreds of different companies? Processing these calls is tough work, demanding a rare combination of brains, finesse, tenacity, mastery of the English language and an engaging personality: Quality can't happen when the people who take the calls and deliver the messages don't stay with the position long-term. Centratel doesn't play this no-win game. Our quality is the highest available anywhere largely because we do what we have to do to keep people long-term. This means we can't, and won't, be part of the endemic telephone answering service industry price-war game. By being up-front about our higher rates, I offer you a congruent message: Our high quality is supported by believable, tangible evidence, not "we care more so we're the best" promises that could not possibly be kept in the real world.

For the record, every single call that we handle is processed here in our Bend, Oregon offices. We don't "offshore" call traffic.

It's true: One "gets what one pays for." As discussed above, I don't promise the lowest service rates but I personally guarantee a level of quality that is unsurpassed: We are "The Best in the United States.". At Centratel, our market is the telephone answering service customer who is truly interested in quality first. We do more than pay our people well: We also have independent quality control and customer service departments; our documented system protocols mean zero-defect efficiency, and we use the most sophisticated and reliable equipment available. Of course it costs more to do this!

We don't ask for a long-term commitment from our clients. If the service we provide is not adequate, or things change within the client's business, the client should be free to cease service quickly: We ask for only seven days notice. There is a simple Terms of Service acknowledgement that we ask our new clients to sign.

Three years ago, after nearly 20 years in business, we coined ourselves the “highest quality telephone answering service in the United States.” It’s a bold statement but not over the top: If the quality of service is not the best you'll find anywhere, it's very close. Evidence includes our most recent "customer reported error rate" which was one reported error for every 7,135 message transactions (January-June 2008). Here's another interesting statistic: Centratel's average small business account stays with the company for over seven years. Not bad considering that 80% of all small businesses fold within five years. What better indicator of quality than our customer's long-term patronage?

Unlike most telephone answering services, Centratel limits service to a small and specific group of businesses and professions. Focused and knowledgeable, we’re expert in specific categories of business. If your business or profession is among those few categories in which we specialize, our expertise will allow us to seamlessly fit into your operation, providing no-nonsense, high quality telephone answering service that precisely meets your needs.

Background: In the early 80's I managed a family run publishing business here in Bend, Oregon. Over those four years we used all three local answering services twice each, unsuccessfully searching for real quality. In 1984, in frustration and simultaneously seeing an opportunity, I bought one of the smaller local services and proceeded with a single premise, based on our own bitter experience as telephone answering service customers: "Certainly there are customers who will be willing to pay more for the best. Unequaled staff performance will provide Centratel a higher income; this higher income will be routed directly back to answering staff who will be paid according to their individual and group performance. All this will be supported within an organization that is near flawless in its efficiency." It's a simple formula and we've stuck with it since the beginning, and within our industry of approximately two thousand answering services nationwide, it is a formula that has been a big part of placing Centratel within a very, very small circle of elite quality telephone answering services.

Centratel "went national" in 1996, beginning a ten year, 600% growth process in the midst of an industry in decline.

As mentioned earlier, our growth has been due almost entirely to new accounts that came to us because they were searching for better service quality than what they were experiencing with their former telephone answering service provider. At the risk of denigrating my own industry, it is my opinion that quality problems have always been, and continue to be, chronic to the telephone answering service business. It is easy to understand why: This is a very complex business and there is much that can go wrong.

Of course this website and my personal Blog are open to all, including other telephone answering services. I am not concerned about revealing secrets of our success to answering service competitors because the principles we use take substantial additional monetary investment (for example, Centratel TSR wages are approximately 50% higher than industry standards and we use a meticulously organized and executed management process including two distinctly independent departments: One geared exclusively to answering quality; the other to customer services). It's not easy! How we do what we do is difficult to put into practice and hard to maintain over the long-term.

Still with me? Following are the fundamental tenets of Centratel quality:

1) This telephone answering service business is an incredibly complex "system of systems" and meticulous organization and point-of-sale execution is absolutely mandatory if there is to be exceptional quality of service: Documented principles, protocol, methodology and honest self-evaluation are at the heart of what we do. I list this point first because without thoroughly documented and systematic operational protocols, no matter what else a telephone answering service owner does right, there can't be really high quality of service. There are too many things that can go wrong. I am passionate about "systems methodology."

2) As mentioned previously, we specialize in certain categories of business. This allows us to become very familiar with just a few specialty vertical markets . Unlike 98% of competing telephone answering services, we don't attempt to "be all things to all people."

3) Our Telephone Service Representative (TSR) and customer service personnel are very well paid earning 75% over industry standards, with as much as 30% of their individual compensation keyed directly to their own personal performance. Every one of our staff members is a full-time, career professional. We don't employ part-time staff as is common with most telephone answering services. There is very little staff turnover, with some TSR tenures exceeding 15 years. Here's our benchmark: A sizeable percentage of our staff is composed of single mothers with children. It is our policy to pay these single parents enough to support their families AND "have a life." Full-time career people who are well compensated (and rewarded for their own personal performance) are people who are very serious about what they do; their output is superb.

As a side-thought, it is interesting to note that the people who answer the phones, TSR's, are very seldom mentioned in competitor web site advertising. Why is that? TSRs are the people who process incoming customer calls and are clearly the heart of any telephone answering service's quality. In reality, whatever telephone answering service you employ, these individuals are the people you will be hiring to talk to your customers, often in urgent situations. Here is a link to our staff page.

4) Our principles of operation, procedures and system protocols are meticulously created, exactly documented and rigorously applied. Our staff knows what is expected and our clients know what to expect. There are no surprises and there is no on-going fire-killing. The end result of this attention to detail: very few errors in an industry that is by nature, profoundly error-prone. As mentioned previously, 98% of Centratel’s newest clients have been with another answering service before, and virtually all of these clients came to us because of quality problems with their former provider.

5) A distinct and independent department of Centratel, with its own budget, is dedicated to Telephone Service Representative (TSR) quality control. On a continual and intense basis, a sizeable sampling of each TSR's calls are reviewed in detail. Every week, each TSR meets with our Quality Team to review sampled messages, one-on-one. The review is tough and thorough and complex. These reviews are scored and, with a high enough score, TSRs receive a significant monthly bonus. Another separate and independent department is dedicated to answering questions from clients as well as facilitating the immediate resolution of any problems that might arise. As with the rest of Centratel's operation, key commonalities of these two departments are independence, intensity, documentation and point-of sale response (in which any customer issue is handled NOW). Each of the managers of these two departments reports directly to the President/General Manager/majority owner of the company: me.

6) Drug testing is frequent and thorough. Centratel has a zero-tolerance policy on drug abuse. Without going into detail, trust that for a variety of reasons this is a very important issue for any telephone answering service.

7) Our telecom and internal communications equipment and systems are cutting edge, offering the highest level of reliability and the widest selection of service options available anywhere. We employ a full time, career CMSE qualified IT engineer.

8) Each of our clients has a message taking/message delivery protocol designed to meet their company's exact needs.

9) If there is an error on our part, that error is a very big deal. All details of a complaint, and all details of that complaint's resolution, are shared real-time via email with EVERY employee and EVERY member of the Board of Directors.

For your information, Board members are Sam Kirkaldie (minority owner, Customer Service Specialist), Linda Carpenter (Chief Financial Officer), Andi Freeman (Chief Operations Officer), Hollee Welch (Telephone Answering Service Manager), and me. Every one of us is intimately involved with the day-to-day operation of Centratel.

10) Every call is recorded via Centratel's integrated digital voice recording system. Any question about a particular call can be answered by a simple review of the caller-TSR dialog. Any message, including both sides of the conversation, can be delivered to the client via internet WAV file. Unless a client decides they don't want the service, calls are kept on file for three years. And, every day, our Quality Department uses this same system to review dozens of TSR messages.

11) My co-owner, Sam Kirkaldie, and I, are intimately involved in day-to-day operations

12) We are located in Bend, Oregon. Unlike the South, East and Midwest our region seldom suffers violent weather patterns that cause long-term electrical and telephone outages. This means reliability and consistency in service (Centratel's "uptime" exceeds 99.99%). Another advantage to our Northwest location is that our native Oregon TSR's are "accent neutral." This means anyone, anywhere can understand them clearly. Yes, this can be a problem for answering services in other parts of the country!

So, in this rather lengthy summary, you have an overview of Centratel and why we are proud to be the best telephone answering service in the U.S.! When you are ready to contact us about service for your small business or professional office, either call us at 1-800-664-7159 or reach us via the "Price Quote" page on this site. Our New Account Specialist, Andi Freeman, will answer any questions you may have.

Thanks again for your inquiry!

Sam Carpenter
President, CEO