Introduction
A Telephone Answering Service is essentially an Inbound Call Center that specializes in receiving messages for a wide range of clients. A typical Telephone Answering Service (TAS) usually consists of from four to 30 agent stations and provides message services for 200 to over 1,000 clients. At present, there are approximately 2,800 TAS businesses operating in the US that provide ‘live-answer’ messaging services.

Market Size
Recent technological advances have expanded the range of services that Telephone Answering businesses offer their clients. Services include alpha-numeric paging, voice mail assist, fax message delivery, e-mail message delivery, text message delivery to wireless telephones, and even order entry, reservation, and appointment services. While the number of individual TAS businesses has declined over recent years, overall market revenues have tripled to over $3-billion. This improvement in revenues is mainly due to technical advances that have made it possible for even a relatively small TAS business to take advantage of new communications services for a modest investment. This trend of increasing revenues is expected to continue for several reasons:

• As daily life becomes more automated, people are willing to pay more for personalized services.
• There are situations where interface with another human is absolutely required.
• There are other situations where personal interaction is considered a definite benefit - even a selling advantage.