News / Telecommunications
The End of The Public Phone System 2018, Will Substantially Impact the Answering Service Industry According to Main Virtual Office
The 134 year old public telephone system is scheduled to be completely transitioned over to VOIP by 2018 and this will have a tremendous impact on answering service companies.
The telephone answering industry has a poor reputation, and understandably so, as it requires a live human interaction combined with complex telecommunications systems. However, the public telephone system as we know it is on its way out. The transition from circuit switched legacy network to internet protocol, or IP based voice communications, also called voice over internet protocol, or VOIP, is set to be completed by 2018.
More than 80% of phone answering service companies have been in business for more than 10 years. These businesses are built on top of the complex public telephone infrastructure. The emergence of cloud based VOIP contact center solutions threatens these businesses in a big way. Answering service companies that have leveraged cloud based solutions like Main Virtual Office, can easily scale and provide more efficient call handling without any outlay for capital equipment.
"This is a huge reshaping of the answering service market," says Jim Plunkett of Main Virtual Office. With 80% of callers hanging up when they are sent to voice mail (Fortune 2006), small businesses that continue to depend on it for their business are committing suicide says Plunkett.
About Main Virtual Office
Leading the transition in the answering service market, Main Virtual Office leverages a proprietary cloud based solution with a mobile app that allows messages to be viewed and managed much like email.
