commercials. Our biggest challenge became how to staff for them. Many times these calls would come during the middle of the night when we had the least amount of staffing and they had the lowest advertising costs. We found ourselves making money, but also driving clients away. During a wave of calls, we might miss an important one or be slow to pick up another. We tried to add a machine to answer the calls and put the call- ers into a queue, but that went against our sales pitch of a ‘Live Answer.’ If one of these larger clients was successful with their TV ads, they would leave us and go to a much bigger company. It was a catch-22. If we added staff, and our customers did not advertise our profits would disappear. Worse we could lose money. If we didn’t, we would miss the spikes. Our customers were very savvy and familiar with this dilemma. They knew they couldn’t do it themselves. We needed a new pricing model to solve the problem. We could no longer charge per call for large clients. COMPUTER TELEPHONY CONVERGENCE As the equipment began to change so did Stephen’s job. He found himself frequently near the wall where the telecom circuits were installed with an orange butt set. A butt set is a fancy phone with alligator clips used by tele- com repairmen. With it, you could attach to a set of pins and monitor a telephone circuit. The circuits needed constant attention. Our local telephone repairmen trained him. Soon, it was time to take the next big step, a full-fledged computerized telephone answer- ing service system. We narrowed the search to two vendors, Tascom and Amtelco. Steve liked Amtelco because it was software-based making it more easily upgraded, but I chose Tascom, a hardware-based system, mainly because it was being sold by a giant public company called Conrac Alston. I reasoned that I wanted to make sure if we are going to bet the company on technology, I wanted a vendor to be around to help us support it over the long run. When we first bought our new system I took my top two managers whose judgment I respected, Lois Cornwall and Barbara Turner, to California for training. The new systems required all the operators
to type on a keyboard. This was something that made me very leery. We never did that before. One of my biggest concerns at the time was how we were going to find enough staff that could type. It was a real fear. I got cold feet and tried to back out of the contract. I was convinced we would never be able to find enough operators with typing skills! It took Lois, Barbara, and the president of the company to cool me down and assuage my fears. They all assured me that we could do it! We installed our first Tascom system and joined the users’ group. Those meetings were split between operations and technology. I would often go with an operations manager, and Steve would represent us on the techni- cal track. During the early years, we were all like sponges. It felt like we were small potatoes in a big pot. I remember one member of the user’s group, Max Kelley of Kelley’s Answering Service, Seattle, Washington. They had multiple centers and thousands of clients. I admired the owner, Max Kelley. He employed all of his kids. They were the best example of my own dream. A few years after we were fully estab- lished with Tascom, Steve recalled raising his hand in a users group meeting suggesting that they should support different fonts and colors. He wanted to emphasize critical parts of the
Steve at initial TASCOM training in California wearing a keyboard shirt in front of a rented Chevy Mustang. 1988
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