A telephone
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secretary
WHILE telephone answering machines serve the highly useful purpose of providing a holding exercise, there is much to be said for an intellige,nt human being answering every call. This is a service provided by Air Call with headquarters in London and 22 provincial offices.
The Air Call telephone answering service is manned 365 days of the year, 24 hours of the day, and its great advantage is that the subscriber's own number is used.
When the light flashes on the Air Call switchboard console the operator can identify the company being called. She answers the telephone as would an employee of the company and is trained to gauge priorities.
There are four variations on the Air Call answering service. The direct service provides an answer on an extension between the operator's office and the Air Call office where Air Call takes the messages and the subscriber collects them at the end of the day or the end of the week.
The referred service has calls transferred to Air Call by the Post Office and again messages are collected and passed on at the subscriber's request. To use this service the Post Office has to be advised to refer calls to Air Call, giving the Air Call extension number.
The accommodation service works on the basis that customers are given the subscriber's number and extension, and messages are collected.
A separate Post Office line is used for a terminated line service. And as described earlier, this means that the subscriber has his own personal line which can be listed in the telephone directory; that the calls are answered in the name of the individual or the company; and that the caller need never know that they were speaking to anyone other than the transport manager's secretary.
Selective Audio Messages Ltd, which is located in London (01-882 6411), provide a similar service, Its sovereign service stands in for the office staff when they are absent, while the diplomat service acts' as the customer's office. For the moment, SAM's activities are confined to a sizeable region in the South East of England bounded by Luton, Ascot, Guildford, Gatwick, Sevenoaks and Basildon.
Both Air Call and SAM operate a paging service in conjunction with their telephone answering services. In effect, this means that the subscriber can be contacted immediately either by voice paging or tone paging. In the first instance the message is communicated to him by the telephone operator; the second service provides a warning that he is required to contact the operator. Monthly rental usually runs at about £15.