How Answering Service Came to Life

For the remaining days of her life, someone bedridden had a simple idea that turned into a legacy for her children, a business for some people, and a worthy service for the rest of the world.

In 1923, a bedridden woman named Margaret Smith realized she could still make money by taking calls for busy doctors from her bed. She might not be able to move much but she can still talk and use her mind. From there, she started her own company, Mrs. Smith’s Doctor’s Exchange. The company was under her supervision for two years, until her death. Seeing the feasibility of the business, her children took over the business, and opened it up to a wider scope of commercial clients in 1933. The company continued to succeed and eventually, in 1955, they moved their business from their home to an office block downtown. In 1980, they made use of a computerized system for their operations.

This was the start of an answering service founded by a single proprietor, representing the the number of professionals who work from their homes, making use of their own technologies to offer the service to clienteles.

On the other hand, call centers offering answering services also have their own roots. Its history goes back to 1969, many years after the birth of the answering service. The company 1-800 We Answer started similarly to Mrs. Smith’s Doctor’s Exchange, operating from a residential apartment. With the efforts of its founders, the company grew; in 1992, Robert Porter, the son of co-founder Bob Sickinger, took over the operations of the company. The company focused on businessmen and medical professionals as their clients.

How about the technology they made use of a computerized system for their operations answering service? These tools have provided a solution for the problem of unanswered phone calls. They have dominated offices and households for years, even when the presence of the answering service already becomes prominent. People have opted to use these technologies rather than acquiring the service, since it’s more affordable for the people.

The following are forms of the earliest answering machines:

Telegraphone – invented by Valdemar Poulsen, a Danish inventor, in the year 1900. It was a magnetic device, which stores the sound on a thin piece of wire. The wire would then be replayed on Polsen’s machine, where the original audio could be heard. After a few years, he updated the device to automatically answer the phone before recording the sound.

Telescribe – invented by Thomas Edison in 1914. It was a device that records audio on wax cylinders. It was based on the idea of using the phonograph as a telephone recorder. It was short-lived and the device didn’t succeed.

The First Automatic Answering Machine - German inventor Willy Muller was thought to have created the first answering machine in 1935. It was a fully automated answering device, standing at three feet tall. It served the religious communities of the Jewish Orthodoxy, who were forbidden to answer the phone during Sabbath.

Ansafone – the first answering machine sold in the US was invented by Dr. Kazuo Hashimoto, a prolific inventor in the ’50s. His device hit the market in the 1960s.

Model 400 – this was introduced by PhoneMate in 1971. It weighed 10 pounds and allowed the person to listen to the recorded message in private.

The birth and innovation of two technologies have brought services that provided options with benefits to individuals, depending on their needs.

The answering machine that can record messages, and is most suitable to be used for households, and the answering service that can cater business functions most suitable for offices and busy professionals.

Older Post:

• Is It Time To Have a Virtual Assistant
• Why Add Voice Mail to Your Answering Service?
• When Physicians and Medical Call Centers Don’t Go Well

Is It Time To Have a Virtual Assistant

Are you wondering why your colleague can finish all the tasks and still has time to enjoy a good eight to ten hours of sleep? While here you are, cramming with all your business’ paperwork and emails at the wee hours of the night.

The sound of hiring someone to fill the position of doing administrative tasks like answering your calls, checking the email, accounting, etc., worries you about the expense of letting another person in to your company, tagging along company responsibilities like employee benefits and other needed actions for employee retention.

Worry no more about these issues that keep on nagging your mind. The outsourcing industry has offered yet another solution to your woes.

Virtual assistants, or commonly called as VAs, are the persons in charge to handle the tasks that is covered by the answering service. The VA can be a single person who owns and manages his/her own answering service business or they can be working for a Call Center Outsourcing company.

Most of the VAs work as self-employed individuals who offer services like administrative, technical, creative (social) tasks to professionals who need to gets all the work done. Most of the people who avail of the VA services are doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and other high-ranking people who need secretarial services, yet don’t want to hire a person literally.

VAs can also come from call center outsourcing companies which offer virtual assistance services to various clients—from individual professionals to small businesses. Outsourcing companies can assign one or a group of VAs to do the specific tasks that need to be done by the client.

There are an estimated 25,000 virtual assistants worldwide, an indication that it is a growing profession in centralized economies where high attrition staffing practices is rampant.

Hiring the service of a VA is one strategic move for any individual or business. VAs does not make their clients responsible for any employee-related taxes and any insurance and benefits. Clients are also saved from adding spared office space, equipment and supply. The only expense clients have to shoulder is the direct payment for the service, either to a single VA or multi-VAs.

But it should be remembered that self-employed virtual assistants are not employees but business owners; thus, they gauge their own rate and formulate their own standards and policies, pay their own employment taxes and control the management of his/her work flow.

VAs from Call Center outsourcing companies are managed and directed on what they have to work on. They are paid by the call center company they are working for. Thus, bear in mind that you are not their direct boss, but you are one of their customers.

The common modes of communication and data delivery are the Internet, e-mail, phone call conferences, online work space and fax machines. VAs in this business works in a contractual basis; thus, cooperation between the client and the VA is significant.

Many of the VAs specialize in tasks, that is why most of them are also called Virtual Specialists. Most common tasks that would be specialized by VAs include Marketing, Web Design and Programming, Social Media, Bookkeeping, Reception, sales and management. But besides these, most VAs can provide across-the-board administrative work.

Whether you are a professional that needs general secretarial services or a business owner who also needs to accomplish all the administrative tasks, the VA/VAs needed would depend on the volume, type and the variety of work that needs to be done.

VA services mostly come with minimum cost, compared to the expense of hiring an actual person for the job; thus, critics about the service have also surfaced. One common critic is that you get what you paid for. If you availed for an hourly service for only $3 compared to an hourly service of $5, you don’t have the full power to expect the most sophisticated work delivered to you.

Also, since VAs usually come from different time zones, challenges in communication and maintaining the contact is also questioned. Many have experienced disruption of service from VAs coming from three time zones away, so how much more for those from ten time zones away? There’s no need to worry that much about this. Many of these VAs offer free trial periods for you to try and evaluate their service.

In conclusion, the pros and cons of acquiring virtual assistance services are always present. After all, not all things are good enough. In the end, you are the one who’ll decide whether or not hiring a VA is a must for you and your business. Just weigh the pros and cons and your needs, and you can come up with the answer anytime soon.

Older Post:

• Why Add Voice Mail to Your Answering Service?
• When Physicians and Medical Call Centers Don’t Go Well
• Answering Calls for a Difference

Doctors Answering Service: A Useful Device In Modern Times

With the stupendous increase in the volume of calls, doctors answering services are also seeing an increase in demand, becoming almost a necessity for medical practitioners, physicians, and doctors.  As their aim is to provide the best possible service to their patients, this service helps in reducing their burden.

All they need to do is sit back and relax and their work will be done by the answering service company. This service It can be customized according the services offered by the doctors. Ideally, it helps in scheduling and rescheduling an appointment, taking messages, confirming the visiting time of the doctor, asking for reports, and many other such myriad tasks.

That is not all, apart from setting up appointments; the services also remind the patients of the same. The doctors answering service are mostly effective where there are a large number of departments and numerous physicians working within these departments. It helps in easily transferring calls to the concerned departments.

With a system like this, proper communication between the doctor and patient can be maintained. If the doctor is unavailable at the moment, the service records the patient's message so that the physician can access it anytime they want. As per statistics, patients would rather listen to an interactive voice program on the doctors answering service instead of a dial tone or voice mail recording.

Keeping an answering machine in any clinic or hospital is more affordable than appointing two or three persons at the reception to answer phone calls. The service is quite reasonable and works 24*7. 

Lastly, it does not require any monetary maintenance, does not involve any bonuses or increments, and works in just the same way. So, a doctors answering service helps in reducing doctors’ burden with just a minimum one-time investment.