ut oh those pesky phones ringing off their hooks! It's a good thing - if your phones aren't ringing you're really in trouble, right? The telephone is an essential communications tool for businesses of any size, but making and returning phone calls can easily turn into the most time-consuming part of your day. Customers get frustrated with voicemail, but you've got to be out of the office once in awhile.

That's where Continental Message Solution Inc. (CMS) comes in, providing a full-service call center solution for individuals and larger companies alike. With its complete range of telecommunications options, CMS' goal is to help make your business run smoothly and sound good.

Continental Message Solution has been in the business of taking messages since the days when that involved picking up the telephone receiver, speaking with the person on the other end and writing the information on a pink message slip. The company started in 1967 as a live answering and secretarial service. These days, processing information is slightly more complicated, and CMS has adapted to offer services that meet the varied needs of its clients.

First impressions are still critical. It's called customer relations management these days, but responding politely, promptly and professionally to incoming phone calls has always been a cornerstone of good business practices.

CMS services run the gamut, from 24-hours-a-day, 365-days-a-year live answering for phone coverage when you're not available to accepting any other type of inbound calls, such as order placements, help desk or advertising responses, and all kinds of outbound telemarketing services, including lead generation.

Rich Titus handles customer accounts and sales for CMS. Its clients are satisfied, he said, because of his company's many years' experience and flexibility in offering programs designed to meet the needs of individual businesses.

"We are, in essence, a full service call center that can follow through on a client's call from the beginning to the finish, depending on what the client wants," he said. "Our primary services are inbound and outbound call center applications. We can basically handle anything. It's just a matter of programming our systems and training our operators. It's 100 percent customizable. We start with a blank slate and go from there."

Continental's operators will answer the phone exactly the way a business wants it answered, with the business name or as that business' answering service. Titus said that some of his company's clients utilize the services for after-hours emergency calls, too.

CMS is located in Columbus, Ohio, but answers phones, after-hours emergency calls and places calls for customers around the country. There are 55 employees, including inbound and outbound operators, who handle between 4,500 and 5,000 inbound calls and place 1,500 to 2,000 outbound calls daily.

"I don't see the phone bill," Titus said.

The variety of services offered by CMS can benefit any business, he said: "We can help the one- or two-person business who wants to give the impression of being a larger organization as well as larger companies who want their customers to get a live person when they call in. We are definitely experiencing an increase in sales for live answering, in reaction to 'voicemail hell' that everyone hates."

Inbound services include basic call forwarding or 24-hour and after-hours answering. The variety of ways CMS customers use the answering service include:

• Serving as a communications department.

• Credit card approval and processing.

• Customer service and help lines to catalog order-taking, special-events lines, an ethics and fraud hotline, and media-response lines.

Operators will take messages and deliver them by fax, voicemail, e-mail or pager. The CMS call center is equipped with the AMTELCO Infinity 5.1 system, which provides state-of-the-art messaging and voice processing through digital switching technologies and complete statistics. With tools like automatic call distribution, voice processing, text messaging and PBX capabilities, CMS can easily become any business' partial or complete customer resource center.

Some of the solutions CMS provides for its customers include answering the phones for 280 departments, including medical departments and doctors, in a major university hospital; serving as a dispatch service for a grocery chain facility-maintenance department; answering the incoming calls for a large HVAC service contractor; and receiving emergency disaster calls for the American Red Cross.

Banks, insurance companies, property-management firms, plumbers, attorneys and even an ISO also use CMS to take incoming calls for them - and even to make outgoing telemarketing calls, for lead generation among other purposes.

Douglas Mack of Card Payment Services, also in Ohio, is a member of The Green Sheet's Advisory Board and has been working with CMS for seven years. "We currently use them strictly for lead generation. They will work with individuals or with entire organizations and are very easy to work with," Mack said. "Prior to us, they didn't have any experience in the merchant services industry."

Mack said the people at CMS were open to learning about the particular ins-an-outs of the payment-processing business. He's been very pleased with their results, too.

"They have been very successful in meeting or exceeding the number of appointments each day," he said. "The vast majority of their leads are very good - they've been averaging about one lead per billing hour with an older database that we will soon be replacing. We expect those to then increase to 1 1/2 or two per hour. I would highly recommend the use of their service to anyone ... at least anyone not located in our area!"

Titus explained that lead generation can include any or all aspects of the process: "We ask the client, 'What are your expectations? What results do you want? How many appointments do you want set per week?' We'll develop databases or vendor lists, make prospecting calls to determine what the interest is and qualify the potential customer for them. We can provide a point for our clients to start from or expand beyond that.

"We'll prepare a script, which the client reviews, and a fact sheet. We have people at four stations in the call center devoted to the outbound calls."

Once CMS receives all the necessary and pertinent information from the client, the telemarketing campaign can be started in as little as three to five business days.

Most companies like to outsource telemarketing efforts to eliminate staffing and equipment expenses, Titus said. CMS clients use the company for telephone campaigns in fundraising, political elections, membership pushes, direct mail follow-ups and market research through surveys and polls. Database management and reporting can also be included in a telemarketing program.

CMS follows restrictions spelled out in the Telephone Protection Act of 1992 in all telemarketing campaigns it takes on. It doesn't contact customers before 9 a.m. or after 9 p.m. and keeps an in-house "No Call" list for people who ask not to be called again.

It also will determine the best time to place calls based on the type of campaign its client is running; campaigns involving businesses rather than individuals have different time constraints.

One of the things that Mack likes about Continental Message Solution is that "they are VERY reasonably priced. They charge us an hourly rate." Rates for receiving inbound calls and placing outbound calls, as well as for all other CMS services, can be on a per-hour or per-project basis.

Titus said that the cost for using CMS' services varies and depends on what the clients needs are and the amount of activities generated by the account. Costs can include hourly charges, per-project charges and set-up and other fees.

As Mack said, and many other business owners know, the cost of making an excellent first impression - and then maintaining that level of customer service after the initial call - is priceless.

According to Mack, "In the near future, we will most likely be using CMS to handle our overflow calls and calls after hours. We do not and will not have voicemail. We would much rather a human pick up the phone 24/7 and have a message sent directly to the requested contact's phone."