We understand the importance of each and every phone call to your business. The numbers confirm our dedication: since 1999, we have answered 79 percent of all calls on the first ring; and less than 3 percent of calls ever ring more than four times. While other answering services put callers on hold to improve their first-ring statistics, we answer calls and never put the caller on hold. You can hear for yourself how well we represent your funeral home by listening to the recorded conversations in our message-retrieval system.

We know our systems inside and out because we built them to spec. No off-the-shelf product could meet our exacting requirements for a messaging system designed exclusively for funeral homes. So we did it ourselves. We now have more than 150 settings that allow us to tailor our approach to your callers according to your wishes.

We also designed our own ASD Schedule Forecaster, which we use daily to monitor and adjust our staffing levels as needed, down to the minute. We even use this system to assign staff breaks, assuring optimal response to call volume.

When we moved in 2006 to a bigger, better facility, we designed our Data Center to have the latest systems and redundant servers, making sure we run at peak performance at all times. The ASD technical team uses only proven industry standards and systems to support our operations, and it conducts nightly backups of our database, storing the information off-site for another layer of security.

We are sticklers on redundant systems, because down time is not an option. It's like wearing a belt and suspenders to make sure you're always covered. When it comes to our telephone lines, we use a fiber-optic SONET Ring network for the optimal protection against failure, connecting to the national phone network through four different routes. Any of these access points can be severed without disrupting your service.