Telephonic communication plays an extremely important role in today's business environment and the prompt and courteous handling of incoming telephone calls is of paramount importance to those engaged in commercial business activity. When an incoming business call is unanswered because the line is busy or not manned a business opportunity is lost.
There are a number of solutions to this problem. The most effective, from a result point of view only, is to provide a collocated alternative path for the call to a secretary when a principal is either not available or is busy on another call. Unfortunately this solution is not always practical when costs and benefits are taken into consideration.
The remote shared telephone answering industry grew out of a need for a cost effective representative to accept incoming telephone calls when the called party was either not available or engaged in some other activity away from the office or on another call.
The answering machine and more recently centralized voice mail with their prerecorded greetings are very cost effective solutions to the unattended or unanswered phone, however, they are by far the least effective solution since many callers refuse to talk to a machine and hang up.
Since the remote shared telephone answering service uses a person to answer the call it provides a cost effective alternative to a dedicated secretary and has grown as a result. In response to this growth the service provider telephone industry has made available cost effective services specifically addressing the perceived needs of the answering services. Direct Inward Dialing (DID) is by far the service of choice of the telephone answering industry since it is a least cost solution for providing an answering service only.
Incoming calls are diverted to an answering service for many different reasons. In many instances the called party may be available at another phone, away from the office for a brief time only, engaged in another telephone conversation, failed to answer the call in a timely manner, or just forgot to cancel call-forwarding. In many of these situations it is often desirable (under client instructions) to forward the call to an alternative number where the caller can either reach the called party or some other informed party designated by the client.
Due to inherent service and equipment limitations call transfer is not a viable option for a telephone answering service. Therefore, calls that reach the service are dead ended since there is very little that an operator can do for the calling party other than not the call and pass that information on to the client, usually at some much later time. This often results in telephone tag.
The use of call transfer coupled with the ability to easily locate a client or designee would allow an answering service to more closely approximate the role of a dedicated receptionist for their clients. However, with conventional services and equipment specifically designed for the available service this can not be accomplished at a reasonable cost.
The Direct Inward Dialing (DID) service provided by the telephone industry is particularly suitable for use by a telephone answering service since it provides caller ID, however, it can accommodate incoming calls only. In order to transfer a call received on a DID line it is necessary to provide additional conventional outgoing lines over which the transfer can be effected. In addition, local switching means are required in order to connect the calling party on the DID line to the transferred to party (the client or designee) on the separate conventional line.
In addition to cost this arrangement has many other drawbacks. Probably the most critical drawback is the fact that both the DID line and the outgoing line used in the call transfer are tied up for the entire duration of the conversation between the caller and the client. Since the average business call lasts three minutes a substantial increase in line capacity is required. The cost of this increase must be borne by the client. Since it is substantial it is an impairment to providing the service to a large number of clients.