2545 Hempstead Tpke Suite LL2
East Meadow, NY 11554
Phone: (800)373-3499 ; (516) 829-5660
Email: info@portanswer.com
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lbear's blog
Message Musings at Port
My blog is designed as musings about the messaging process. I'll tell you what we're up to, what we hear that may effect your messaging process. Feel free to respond to any of the postings.
I bought Port Telephone Answer Service, Inc. the first of this year (2007). Simmie Dunst had owned the business for 26 years prior to selling it to me. She built a nice customer base and developed a good staff over the years. The business was a "life style" business for her. She did a nice job.
Without Proper Technology in Place, Call Center Leadership 'Managing Blind'
We just installed new technology to help our clients manage their calls. Here's an interesting article published in Hospital Access Management that gets to the core benefits of having the right technology in a call center.
No more "One Ringy Dingy"
A colleague of ours Marcy Hewlett in Arizona authored an article for a regional medical magazine called Medical Industry Technology. The article is in the June 2007 issue. It is about the answering service industry and how it has changed. She captured the essence of how we work in today's world.
Making Sure our Service is Always Available
Always is a long time ... and a strong statement. Lots can happen with power, with phone lines, with fiber connections and all. To do our best to always be available for our clients, we need redundant systems. With our new system we decided the best way to provide that redundancy is to outsource the responsibility to people whose business is providing companies with computer reliability. We chose to place our key equipment in a "co-location".
Proper Messaging is Complex
One of the raps on the Pinnacle system is that it is hard to program. After participating in a week long beginning class to learn how to program the system, I have a different take. It's not hard.
What's hard is understanding exactly how our clients gather information. It's our client's decision tree we need to understand. Once we clearly know the details our clients use to make their initial triage decisions, programming becomes easy. It's simply codifying the decision making process.
Picking New Answering Service Equipment
It's a tough decision. And an expensive one. We need new equipment deliver more services more consistently accurately to our medical client base. We do a good job now. But we can provide more and do it better with the next generation of equipment. So my key decision on which equipment to buy was based on which products delivered the best services for our answering service and call center clients. A second factor was how it helped the operators do a better job in their job of triaging our client's callers.
Managing Communication Processes for Clients
Answering services are all about managing communications. One of the major changes in the answering service industry in the last 20 years has been the automation of repetitive processes. The first iteration in the industry was to eliminate paper messages. This happened in the 80's and early 90's. The next iteration began to make some of the answering operations and the dispatch (delivery of messages) automatic. The second generation of automation happened in the 90's and early 2000's. It was largely driven by changes in telephony ....
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