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Amtelco is a family-owned contact center software company devoted to providing fast, secure, and reliable communication solutions for healthcare, contact centers, and other organizations looking for immediate and reliable connections. Founded in 1976, Amtelco originally began as a manufacturer of telecommunications equipment for telephone answering services and call center systems, but it has since gone from a mom-and-pop shop to a trusted leader in the telecommunications software industry. Amtelco employs more than 120 people and has customers located in all 50 U.S. states and over 20 countries. Amtelco holds more than 30 U.S. patents for telephony software, data handling methodologies, and telephone switching devices.
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| Company type | Privately Held |
|---|---|
| Founded | Wisconsin |
| Headquarters | Wisconsin |
| Website | www.amtelco.com |
Independent employee surveys have resulted in Amtelco being honored by the Wisconsin State Journal as a Top Workplace in Madison, Wisconsin since 2020.
History
editBill Curtin, II was born in 1919 in Chicago, Illinois, to first-generation Irish immigrants. After enlisting and joining the U.S. Air Force in the 1940s, Bill was assigned to Yale University’s communications program. Once Bill was discharged from the military, he and his wife, Eleanor, started an answering service in Madison, Wisconsin.
Bill thought of inventions that would address the limitations of communication technology when he worked the overnight shift. Those inventions would eventually become the foundation of Amtelco.
Amtelco was founded in 1976 by Bill and Eleanor Curtin in the wake of the 1968 U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruling in the Carterphone case, which struck down existing tariffs prohibiting connection to the public telephone network of equipment not supplied by telephone operating companies. The FCC ruling eventually led to the breakup of the AT&T monopoly in the telecommunications industries.
Following the release of its TAS (Telephone Answering Service) Video system, Amtelco became a common name in the telecommunications service industry, its product being one of the first computerized telephone switching system, following the 1ESS switch and one designed by the British GPO Post Office Research Station in the late 1960s[1] and now in the Science Museum in London.
The TAS system soon was succeeded by the EVE system; more powerful and taking advantage of early-model PCs and dumb terminals. By the late 1980s, AMTELCO's EVE (Electronic Video Exchange) system grew to become the most widely used business telephone answering equipment in the industry. Infinity replaced EVE as the flagship telephone switching system.
Amtelco's Intelligent Series (IS) was the next development. IS provides a full suite of call center and enterprise applications, and integrates tightly with the call management suite, providing full featured call control and call management. Implementing Amtelco's integration engine, MergeComm, adds automated scenarios to the IS platform.
The Active Insights platform is Amtelco’s most recent release. It is a native cloud-specific development powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to provide detailed call feedback. Artificial intelligence has diverse applications in the telecommunications sector. Amtelco is focusing on the functionality and development of Active Insights.
Amtelco’s healthcare branch, originally named 1Call, was established in 1997 to offer enterprise-wide clinical communication solutions designed specifically for the healthcare industry. Amtelco is dedicated to serving the unique contact center and communication needs of hospital organizations.
In 2011, Amtelco released its own secure messaging app. Previously known as miSecureMessages, the HIPAA and HITECH-compliant app was specifically developed for hospitals and clinics. The app is now also used by any business that needs to protect confidentiality while sending and receiving texts, photos, audio, and video files.
Telescan, located in St. Louis, MO, was acquired by Amtelco in 2012 to expand new features and product offerings that help TAS businesses decrease operating expenses and increase profits. Today, we have sales and customer care offices throughout the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.
When Amtelco underwent a brand refresh in 2024, all of the branches, office locations, and products previously known by other names were re-branded with Amtelco names and logos.
EVE
editEVE's best use was with a network on a dumb terminal. The screen was separated into 4 parts. The top stated the operator name, whether the operator was available to receive calls, the terminal number, and a date/time group. Below was a space that was capable of displaying 3 lines at once, with the ring count, call status, greeting, and what type of call it was. The bottom portion of the screen was split with individual account information contained on the left side, while the area to take a message was located on the right side. The operator read the information on left side to decide how to dispatch a message, which included instructions to e-mail, fax, print and snail mail, alpha page/text message, call/patch employees on call, or to even ignore messages from individuals.
EVE was a system that could run 64 serial ports at one time, taking messages for up to 10,000 accounts. It used one PC, could fax up to 8 machines at one time while emailing, paging, and mirroring its SCSI drives all while switching 255 live calls. It could run for 6 months at a time without so much as a restart.
Intelligent Series
editThe Intelligent Series (IS) provides a full suite of call center and enterprise applications, and integrates tightly with the call management suite, providing full featured call control and call management. IS blends live agent applications with automated voice services and automated call distribution (ACD). IS can utilize an existing PBX based ACD or it can provide its own robust skills-based routing ACD with easy on-screen administration, priority call routing, overflow, integral voice processing, reporting, and server based PBX integration.
The IS system provides intelligent call and message scripting, interactive messaging, info pages, contact-based dispatching, directories, dispatch lists, event and on-call scheduling, two-way secure e-mail, and event-driven reporting. IS integrates with disparate systems using an integration engine (MergeComm) to bridge communication and collaboration gaps. Some of these include:
- Carrier and PBX Integration
- Active Directory/LDAP Integration
- Two-Way HL7 EMR Integration
- Web Service API Integration
- Vocera Messaging Integration
- Rauland Messaging Integration
- Cisco IP Phone Messaging Integration
- Secure Messaging App Integration
Active Insights
editActive Insights is Amtelco's first native cloud-specific development powered by artificial intelligence (AI). Active Insights is a user-friendly, secure, native, cloud-based platform that provides access to call, message, and speech analytics. Active Insights uses natural language prompting that’s passed to an AI large language model to evaluate calls, check data entry accuracy, caller emotion recognition based on the words being used, and more.
- Automated call scoring. Replace manual scoring and live call listening with an automated call scoring process. Automatically score calls based on pre-defined criteria and export it as a PDF. All the scores automatically get added to a dashboard, which can be viewed remotely.
- Real-time call metrics. Numerous call metrics can be gathered and leveraged to improve operator workflows, evaluate agent performance, gauge caller sentiment, and discover trends. Utilize detailed call log analytics and service level charting to effectively manage workload, plan staffing needs, and analyze call volume. Helpful widgets visually represent target goals and various data grouping options.
- Call transcription. Save a significant amount of time by automatically transcribing recorded calls into text, including a detailed record of who spoke and a full conversation summary.
The AI used by Active Insights can determine caller sentiment, generate an outcome summary of each call, and determine if each call trended positively or negatively. It generates call scores based on agent performance including:
- Call and message handling.
- Accurate and professional use of an answer phrase.
- Confirmation of caller phone number and name spelling.
- The use of proper grammar.
- The agent’s attitude and confidence level.
- How the operator engaged with the caller.
- How the call ended and call outcome.
Amtelco Secure Messages
editAmtelco's secure messaging app was originally developed for the healthcare industry, but the app is used by businesses in many industries, including government, finance, legal, education, and more. Unsurprisingly, the app is a valuable tool for the call center industry.
The secure messaging app is a native design, built and maintained by Amtelco employees. The app easily integrates into existing contact center or answering service platform to provide secure messaging and paging services to mobile devices. The app offers more functionality when used in conjunction with Amtelco’s contact center software and applications.
Amtelco Secure Messages uses an encrypted web service to send secure messages to Android™ and Apple® iOS devices, as well as a secure web application to communicate with office staff. The app can be tailored to meet each site’s secure messaging and paging needs, and is available as an on-site solution and as a cloud-based subscription service.