“May I help you?”
Beverly Grabiec repeats that phrase approximately 400 times a day during her shift at Per-Com Inc., a telephone answering service in Palos Heights.
“There are only two accounts where we don’t say that, and both are funeral homes,” said Grabiec, 55, of Matteson. “You don’t want to be real cheery and up when someone is calling about a matter as serious as death.”
The telemessaging industry relies on the judgment of operators like Grabiec. Greetings that meet the needs of the clients and their customers and services that go beyond traditional message taking are keeping the industry alive and growing in an era of voice mail and answering machines.
“We are much more than a message center. We are a direct extension of the client’s business,” said Lynne Pohl, owner of Per-Com.
The nation’s 4,200 answering services handled in excess of 1.3 billion telephone calls in 1993, according to the Association of Telemessaging Services International, Alexandria, Va. Despite the increase in automated systems, more than a dozen services are available just in the southwest suburbs.
The industry was established to answer a basic need of business: to be available when representatives of the business are not.
The first answering service opened in Portland, Ore., on Nov. 1, 1917-only 40 years or so after Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Genevieve Kidd, a former nurse, started the Doctors Exchange Service, a 24-hour answering service for doctors, dentists and nurses.
Physician answering services were where the telemessaging industry first made its mark. By 1921, hundreds of physician answering services were in business throughout the country; doctors routinely offered “If No Answer, Call” numbers in addition to their office numbers.
Within the next 10 years, telephone answering services expanded to meet the needs of other businesses. In 1932 in Dallas, Pearl Forester opened one of the first commercial accounts with Frigidaire, trading a year’s answering service for a new refrigerator.
These services answered incoming calls, took messages and relayed those messages back to the business, and that’s the way it worked for more than 50 years.
But telephone answering services in the 1980s faced stiff competition from telephone answering devices, voice mail and cellular phones. In response, the industry capitalized on its unique human element and combined live, highly trained operators (known in industry parlance as tele-receptionists) with the latest fax, voice messaging and paging/cellular technologies.
That, coupled with a backlash against automated services, has helped revitalize telemessaging services.
Melanie Chionis, who manages her husband’s Hickory Hills dental practice, was so pleased with Per-Com that she sent them a letter praising their good work. Chionis said the practice used to have a voice mail system but changed to the answering service after several customer complaints.
“We’ve found that people prefer to talk to other human beings,” she said. “And voice mail can’t think for you.”
Chionis said the service doesn’t just take down the name and phone number of a patient, but will ask questions to determine the severity of the situation. “We want our patients to know that someone will always be there,” Chionis said.
According to a recent nationwide survey by ATSI, 88 percent of those polled said automated recordings were less satisfactory than a live person. Thirty-one percent said they rarely or never leave a message on a recorder, and 66 percent said they were likely to call competing businesses until they got a live voice.
That’s no surprise to Pohl. “Say a plumber has 24-hour emergency service. He can’t physically be there 24 hours a day,” she said. “And if you call, you don’t want to just leave a message. You want a human voice at the other end of the line.”
And interactive voice mail systems, in which callers are instructed to press numbers for certain services, can be frustrating. An errant push of the finger can send a caller into “voice mail jail,” Pohl said.
Voice mail is economical, she conceded. And while answering services are more expensive, they are selling an intangible quality. The average bill for an answering service is about $100 a month. By comparison, residential customers can get the more impersonal voice mail through the phone company for about $7 monthly.
“People are rebelling against voice mail,” Pohl said. “It is not the same as having a human voice at the other end of the phone.”
Interactive voice mail hasn’t much affected Tel-Assist, an answering service with offices in Oak Lawn, Lombard and Aurora. The family-owned business answers an average of 250,000 phone calls a month, and owner Mark Herlache said although they’ve lost some customers to the automated systems, “the customers who do stay are those who prefer a live person answering the phone.”
Tel-Assist does offer voice mail service “and it can be successful in the right application, which is to use it internally for two-way messaging as opposed to memos. That is what it was designed for,” he said.
But the popularity of voice mail for business use soared as the public embraced answering machines for home use.
“Those businesses that rely on name, phone number and `please call’ messages-they are hard to service. A machine can do that quite well. But if decisions have to be made, then you need someone who can think and act,” Herlache said.
“This is a lot tougher job than it appears,” added Gary Nelson, owner of Constant Communication, a mid-sized answering service in Alsip. “We also answer the phones for a helicopter rescue service. So in that case, the calls we take are a matter of life and death.”
Pohl previously worked as a sales representative for a fully automated service before opening up Per-Com three years ago.
“I decided customers needed to be treated with respect,” said Pohl, 34, of Palos Park. In its first month, the business handled 800 phone calls. In September 1994, the service answered 60,000 calls for 300 customers.
Client rosters of answering services have expanded to include much more than health-care personnel. Lawyers, insurance agencies, funeral homes, building contractors, architects, landscapers and plumbers are among Pohl’s customers.
At Constant Communication, the client base is made up of service-oriented businesses such as heating and air conditioning repair, and towing services. The service also dispatches repair and maintenance personnel for computer companies, and even monitors television reception for a local TV station, said Nelson of Tinley Park.
He said interactive voice mail hasn’t affected the 3-year-old business. “We’re heavily service-oriented,” he said. “We made our niche and we’ve had steady growth every month.”
Relaying messages is still a big part of an operator’s job, but they also may be taking catalog orders, setting up appointments or acting as dispatchers for clients.
“It’s difficult enough to be a receptionist for one company, and we ask them to answer the phone for thousands and act as their receptionist,” said Herlache.
Most operators work four- to six-hour shifts. “The stress level can be crazy,” Pohl said. She very rarely takes a shift anymore, but remembers handling the overnight calls with her two young children camped out with her at the office.
“We answer the phones for 300 different people,” she said, proud of the fact that only 782 out of 60,000 phone calls in a recent month rang more than three times before the phone was answered.
“This is my place,” said Grabiec, who was 18 years old when she first learned to run a switchboard at a large company and came back to the business after her children were grown. “It’s wonderful. I talk to somebody different every time I pick up the phone.”
Operators go through hours of training-in telephone and computer skills-and usually apprentice with an experienced tele-receptionist before going it alone.
At Per-Com, operators wear lightweight headsets and sit at computer terminals. When a call comes in, a computerized system brings up the client file with instructions on how to answer the call, when the client is available and what to do in case of emergencies. The files are updated almost daily. Messages are faxed to the customer and kept on file for three months, beeper calls are returned, and emergency calls can be patched through to the client.
“Everything is done on the keyboard,” Pohl said. Messages and orders are typed into the computer and saved in the client’s file. “Everything is automated to make us as quick as possible.”
The systems usually block out client home phone numbers so operators cannot give out the number to customers-no matter how much a customer attempts to cajole the operators.
And Pohl is adamant when it comes to foul language. “We will disconnect the customer or the client,” she said. “We won’t deal with rude and obnoxious behavior. You’re not dealing with machines. My operators are people too.”
