Do you remember the “bad old days”? When phone companies charged for every local (!) call you made. This was before free long distance, and back when you wouldn’t give out your cell phone number due to the per minute charges… Strangely enough, that mentality is still true in the answering service industry.
When I started No More Phone Tag over 20 years ago, every single answering service was charging per call, per minute, per patch, per page, and per “everything” fees. I thought this was totally crazy. Just think about it, we as an answering service handle more than 600,000 calls per month. Shouldn’t we be able to predict how much usage will be and then charge a flat rate? It was clear to me from day one that instead of putting our customers in the position of having to predict their bills, we should do it for them. As a result, from the first day we opened our doors on September 1, 1991, all our customers are on our 100% flat rate answering service.