Happy Earth Day! Today we are reminded of how great this planet we live on is, and that we need to do our part to take care of it. While making your office more environmentally friendly will obviously have a positive effect on the environment, a greener office can absolutely become profitable!

Dolores "Dee" Hawkins, president of A Better Answer, is awarded winner as "Women of Influence" by the Great Women of Texas, Professional & Business category. The event originated in 1989. The Fort Worth Business Press recognizes outstanding women as "Women of Influence."

A Better Answer Call Centers (ABA) was honored at the 8th annual Best Places to Work awards luncheon at the Intercontinental in Addison, Texas as one of the top 100 small businesses in Dallas & Fort Worth as A Best Place To Work for 2009 by its employees and the Dallas Business Journal. The employees of A Better Answer Call Centers completed on-line surveys from the Dallas Business Journal awarding ABA a ranking of 5.54 out of a maximum of 6.0 placing ABA in the top 100. A Better Answer Call Centers is an inbound bilingual telephone answering service with regional offices located in the metropolitan areas of Dallas, Fort Worth and Houston. ABA has been 100% female owned and operated since Dee Hawkins established the business in 1971 – a Certified Minority Owned Business. Each of A Better Answer's offices has been and continues to serve their local communities with the latest technology and most creative professional call handling techniques.

A Better Answer’s IT Manager just returned from New Orleans where she attended the National Amtelco Equipment Owners Conference, NAEO. This annual conference allows A Better Answer to view upcoming software and hardware revisions which will allow our support services to run more smoothly.

After taking a breather after the very busy Holiday Season and ending another year, it’s time to say “Thank You” to so many people. We have shopped for just the perfect gift for very special people, attended parties and events, endured sweltering heat, freezing weather and now we are glad to have finished yet another year.

Even though the volume of inbound calls is higher with the interactive phone menu, a new report from the CFI Group (Claes Fornell International), a company specializing in improving customer satisfaction, clearly shows that reaching a live representative instead of an automated phone menu makes a significant difference in customer satisfaction.

What do you think is the most dramatic change to the industry in the past 30 years? Technology and the features we have to offer now that we didn’t when I began: being paperless, calls are recorded, text messaging, amazing reporting options, and storage capabilities just to mention a few! Can you provide a timeline with the company and include where you started, offices, positions, etc.? Telephone Service Representative-8/11/1980-Dallas, Bookkeeper 1981-1990 Dallas, Houston Regional Office Manager 1990-1996, Dallas Regional Office Manger-1 1/2 years, then to trainer-Dallas,(6 months if I remember right!) then to Customer Service Manager where I have found my niche! (12 years) What was it like when you started? Can you describe “a day in the life” back then? Wow! Memories! We had 6-7 switchboards for our daytime service, and a daytime and a 24-hour Telescan table, all in one pretty small room! We had a round table with 4 seats around it, and a big wheel in the middle of the table, with hundreds of slots where we put our clients messages after we hand wrote them and timestamped them! They stayed in the slot until they called us to pick them up-then we timestamped them on the back of the message and wrote a name of who we delivered the message to. In order to bill our clients, we had a scale we would put their stacks of messages on and the scale would count them based on their weight! Then a couple years later we went paperless with our Cass system. We thought it was so cool to not have to handwrite messages any longer! Then came Tascom, where we could answer up to 6 calls at a time and keep them in personal waits just for us! I worked 8 to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, and I always lived in the area of Keystone Park, so if need be I could walk to work, especially when it snowed or iced over! No matter what the weather was like, Hilde was at work! Do you have any special highlights with A Better Answer? Every anniversary has been celebrated, and because I have only worked for A Better Answer, I am not sure there are a lot of companies out there that do that! At too many companies, you are a number or a face. With A Better Answer you are really somebody who is cared about, both professionally and personally! The family atmosphere is wonderful at A Better Answer. I wouldn’t work anywhere else! What are your favorite memories of working here? Lunches and dinners at all kinds of restaurants, traveling over the years with Dee by plane or boat! 5 year pool parties, babies born and watching them grow to young adults! Fall family festivals and the preparation of, yearly planning meetings, quarterly meetings, are what come to mind. There are so many of them to name! There is never a dull moment in the life of anyone working for A Better Answer, you get to wear many hats and work with many personalities. It is both a privilege and honor to work for such a great company! 

A Better Answer recently remodeled their offices in Ft. Worth. The purpose of this recent update was to improve the aesthetics of the office as well as its functionality for employees and clients. “We’re very excited about the new look,” said marketing coordinator Jessica Janosko. “We want our employees to be proud of where they work and we want our clients to feel comfortable. This remodel was a step in the right direction.” A few of the changes include new ergonomic desk chairs, new desks, lockers, acoustical upgrades as well as new carpeting. As a result, Canadian employees are much happier, have a new and more comfortable work space, and clients now have a quieter environment.

We here at ABA are very excited about our venture into the blogosphere!

Long Distance and Wireless Carriers are doing their part to connect American residents with the people they care about that may have been affected by the devastating earthquake in Japan on March 11.