Nick DAlleva

Answering Service Technology Moving at a Rapid Pace

With the technologies available to call centers today like click to call, web chat, and up to the second statistics and metrics, today's answering services hardly resemble their predecessors.

The first answering service has very little resemblance to the high tech call centers of today. In the beginning everything was known as an answering service. Today we see operations known as contact centers, call centers, inbound and outbound telemarketing operations. The answering service industry has seen much technological advancement over recent years. In an industry where the technology moved very slowly during the first fifty years of existence, no one could have predicted the rapid pace which the industry has changed.

Telephony Advances
In the not too distant past, telephone answering services were very limited in their telephony capabilities. Most answering services needed to collocate near the telephony company's switch or POP. Each potential answering service customer needed to have a tie line in order to utilize the service. The "tie" line was a telephone line that had an extension of the phone line at the answering service. This was the only way that an office could use the service.

In the mid 1980's, the industry began to migrate to call forwarding. With the advent of call forwarding telephone answering services and their customers had much more flexibility in their relationships. Around the same time, paperless messaging technology became available. Prior to this, messages were taken in the form of handwritten messages. These handwritten messages were placed in the clients individual mailboxes. When the client needed to retrieve their messages, they would call into the answering service, where the operator would read the messages back to them.

Paperless Messaging
With Paperless messaging changed the face of answering service. Instead of having the messages written on a piece of paper, they were now inputted directly into a computer. This gave the answering service and client far more flexibility, than in the past. Message delivery options opened up as the technology allowed the answering service to deliver messages in a variety of ways. Most companies chose to have messages delivered via either fax or alpha numeric pager. An alphanumeric pager was a device that could receive written messages, much like today's text message.

These changes occurred and progressed from the mid 1980's to the early 2000's. Then the internet exploded. As internet's capabilities grew, so did the answering service's capabilities. With the ability to log directly onto a clients website, answering services could now perform nearly any task. These tasks include order taking, scheduling, CSR, live chat and email support. As the internet capabilities continue to move and progress, so does that of the answering service industry.

In almost every case, technology that would seemingly threaten the existence of the answering service has actually enhanced the services that they provide. In a world where so much is done online and through email, text messaging and social networking, a live voice is still a necessary and valuable tool. The only way that the industry can survive and continue to thrive is to embrace the very technology that could lead to its demise.

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