ISLANDIA, N.Y.-Affordable Message Center has found the gospel of alphanumeric paging and is spreading the word by taking its show on the road nationwide.
From an end-user standpoint, alphanumeric paging provides greater speed than two-way paging, greater message capacity than digital and greater privacy than voice, said Alexander Ott, president of the Islandia, N.Y., master reseller.
At a time when paging prices are going down, alphanumeric offers resellers the potential to triple their revenues per subscriber, according to David E. Honig, the company’s sales manager. “It will allow the smaller resellers, who’d otherwise be out of business, to make a profit,” Honig said.
But alphanumeric paging also is harder to program and harder to explain, Ott said. Consequently, there is a need to “proactively educate the reseller, or he won’t push the product,” Honig said.
Furthermore, resellers have been burned by churn among alphanumeric paging customers who use more messages than the plan they signed up and paid for, and then switch to another company. “The service doesn’t automatically shut off, so the resellers eat the loss in over calls because there is no way to collect the money,” Ott said.
To clear those hurdles, Affordable Message Center has developed and executed an intricate plan designed, company officials say, to provide a win-win scenario for end-users, resellers, carriers and the company itself. One of the keys to its strategy is “Over Call Protection,” a trademarked name for the company’s method of protecting resellers by preventing unpaid overuse of paging services. Affordable Message Center is linked via computer to all of its reseller clients, and all resellers’ customer accounts are with Affordable Message Center. Its computers are programmed to alert staff immediately when end-users are close to using up their paid-for messages.
This spring, the company also introduced “Low and Empty Message Indicators” that notify end-users of their status. A simple billing and additional unit authorization transaction permits further use of the pager.
The company’s 24-hour nationwide dispatch and computer programming center recently began offering instantaneous bilingual Spanish-English translations for people doing business with customers proficient in a different language.
Retail paging customers have their own personal toll-free number. In the New York metropolitan area, customers are being offered local telephone contact numbers. Plans are under way to offer local phone numbers soon in other markets, Ott said.
Affordable Message Center makes bulk purchases of air time from paging carriers, including Metrocall Inc., MobileMedia Communications Inc. (including MobileComm), Paging Network Inc. and ProNet Inc. It also bulk buys pagers and passes on these savings to its customers.
“We are set up like a paging carrier without the frequency. We’re doing all the customer service, the marketing, the pagers, the dispatch. It isn’t cost-effective for carriers to do dispatch,” maintains Ott, who is a computer software engineer. “We have a computer network with direct connection to the carriers, so we don’t have to batch and delay paging message transmission. It’s automatic send.”
Started a decade ago as an answering service, the privately held company switched gears in early 1992 with a decision to focus entirely on developing its role in the indirect alphanumeric paging market as a master reseller and dispatch center.
Until mid-1995, Affordable Message Center only conducted business in the New York City metropolitan area. Since then, it has begun offering its services in all 50 states, in every major market, company officials said.
