The September 2012 Issue of TAS Trader

Pulsar360: full circle solutions

2012 Who’s Who Guide to TAS Vendors

TAS Trader’s “Who’s Who Guide to TAS Vendors” focuses on the telephone answering service (TAS) industry’s leading vendors and support providers. Please consider these providers for the equipment, software, and service needs of your telephone answering service. When you contact them, please mention TAS Trader.

Alston Tascom Inc
5171 Edison Ave Ste C
Chino, CA 91710, USA
www.alstontascom.com
Contact: Carmela Rogers, sales manager, at 866-282-7266 or carmela@alstontascom.com
Specializing in the telemessaging industry, Alston Tascom provides communications products that serve customer needs today and for the future. With thirty years of system design and manufacturing exclusively for telemessaging services, Alston Tascom has been on the forefront of innovative products. Their products exemplify the leading technology: SQL databases, softswitches, and open source platforms; they have been providing true hosted system services for six years.

Amtelco
4800 Curtin Drive
McFarland, WI 53558, USA
callcenter.amtelco.com
Contact: 800-356-9148 or 608-838-4194
Amtelco has supplied communications applications and software solutions to call centers in all vertical markets, as well as system developers, for over thirty-six years. They are proud of their innovative ideas, patents, integration capabilities, cloud-based applications, and call center solutions. Every day, millions of telephone calls, text messages, and secure communications are processed by Amtelco’s Infinity software around the world.

Business Calls
11752 Clarksville Pike
Clarksville, MD 21029, USA
www.businesscalls.biz
Contact: Donna West at 301-854-0284
Provides personalized newsletters for owners in the TAS industry

Map Communications, Inc
840 Greenbrier Circle
Chesapeake, VA 23320, USA
www.mapcommunications.com
Contact: Grant Sibley, CFO, at 800-955-9888 or gsibley@mapcommunications.com
Seeking to acquire answering services

Professional Teledata
Professional Teledata is the developer of the PInnacle TAS system and PInnacle Freedom hosted TAS platform. Professional Teledata is an industry leader and provides customers with software, hardware, and technical support.

Startel Corporation
16 Goodyear Bldg B-125
Irvine, CA 92618, USA
www.startel.com
Contact: Myrna Nunez, sales and marketing administrator, at 949-863-8738 or myrna.nunez@startel.com
Startel Corporation, headquartered in Irvine, California, is a leading creator and provider of software products and professional services offering communications and billing solutions for telephone answering services. Founded in 1980, Startel provides open systems architecture solutions, integrated custom software development, multi-vendor applications, softswitch integration, and an API server that enables RAD.

Szeto Technologies Inc
1881 St-Regis Boulevard
Dollard-des-Ormeaux, QC, H9B 2M9, Canada
www.szeto.ca
Contact: Charlie Szeto at 877-697-9368 or charles@szeto.ca
Szeto Technologies manufactures a digital telephone switch and designs Linux-based TAS software; all products are modular. The scripting function of Szeto’s Call Linx TAS allows script designs to use variable data for logic decisions. Szeto Technologies aims to deliver solutions that surpass clients’ expectations.

TAS Marketing
233 Whitepine Creek Road
Trout Creek, MT 59874, USA
www.tasmarketing.com
Contact: Steve Michaels, president, at 800-369-6126 or tas@tasmarketing.com
TAS Marketing has been serving the telephone answering service industry for over thirty-three years, with over 425 businesses sold. They also sell used equipment and offer business evaluation services.

Telescan, a division of Amtelco
Telescan has been producing hardware and software for the telephone answering services for over thirty years. Telescan is the first vendor to be ATSI certified. Their Windows®-based Spectrum messaging system, powered by the patented Spectrum Prism®, offers telephone answering services a full range of telemessaging solutions.

AnswerOne Celebrates Turning Forty-Five

This September marks the forty-fifth year of operation for AnswerOne of Brooklyn, New York; it was started by Bill Smith and his sister, Ann Gavigan, in 1967. They began with two switchboards and one account; since that time AnswerOne has grown quite a bit. After changing locations three times over the years, they finally settled in the Bensenhurst area of Brooklyn where AnswerOne is still located. Ann died in 1985, at which time Bill took over running the company full time.

“We installed two Amtelco Video III systems in 1978 and upgraded to an EVE system in 1986,” said Bill. After holding out for twenty-five years, AnswerOne finally upgraded to an Amtelco Infinity System in 2011. “The EVE System was a superior product, and I firmly believe that if it’s not broken, don’t try to fix it,” quipped Bill, “but I can see that the Infinity is extremely solid and will serve us well for many years.”

AnswerOne has won the ATSI Award of Excellence for the past six years and the CAM-X Award for four. “I give all the credit for these awards to my wife Joan, who has taken over the customer service function and really improved the quality of the service we provide,” said Bill.

AnswerOne has purchased the accounts from more than ten small telephone answering services over the years and is now looking to expand into other states. “We have put together a rock-solid service and now it’s time to grow even more,” added Bill. He also credits his membership in ATSI, NAEO, and CAM-X for his success. “The people you meet have an enormous amount of knowledge and are more than willing to share.”

News

Amtelco’s miSecureMessages Contact Circles Helps Manage Directories
Amtelco’s miSecureMessages® now has contact circles to help users organize contact lists, speeding the delivery of secure messages to multiple recipients. Administrators can organize contacts into groups or contact circles within the miSecureMessages administration application, as well as add, remove, update, and delete circles. Users of the application can send a message to multiple people or an individual contact in the circle, search for individual contacts, and reply to one, some, or all contacts. Another new feature allows users to toggle miSecureMessages’ persistent alert sound to a different prepackaged alert sound or silence notifications altogether.

SMS Reply Handling Saves Time, Improves Accuracy
Amtelco’s Infinity Intelligent Series (IS) SMS feature provides the ability to send and receive SMS text messages. When an outbound SMS message is sent, a unique reply ID can be included and stored in the message history. The SMS reply goes to the operator who sent the message if still on duty, otherwise a dispatch job is created that is available to all dispatch agents. The reply is appended to the original message history for accurate reporting. The IS SMS feature also allows for unsolicited text messages, which create dispatch jobs that are available to all dispatch operators.

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[Posted by Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD for TAS Trader.]