About Professional Communication Services
By Tom Sheridan

Professional Communication Services was founded in 1959 by Ms. Nellie Rimkus, a Longview, Washington native.  She started the answering service in her home which was located at that time on 30th Avenue in Longview.  Each one of her clients were connected to a separate standard telephone set which rang in her home when her clients went on service. Clients used "secretarial lines" from the phone company and calls were sent to the service via a switch in the client's office when they closed for the day or needed extra help. This was long before "call-forwarding" technology which didn't become available until 1986. Many telephone answering services began this way as home-based businesses. Every call answered was a manual operation at that time because there was no voicemail, call distributor or computer system. Each message slip had to be handwritten and since there were a lot of them, they had to be carefully organized. While Nellie was on the phone with one caller, another phone could start ringing and it became a juggling act during peak periods to keep everyone happy. Since Nellie's husband was ill, by having the answering service in her home, she could always be with him. [Photo: This is an example of an early answering service. The owner often worked long hours and had little or no life outside her home.]

Ten years later in 1969, Nellie sold PCS to The McGraw Company which moved the business out of her home to a new office at 803 Vandercook Way. McGraw installed a three position cordboard with alarms for alarm monitoring along the wall to the left side of the board. They continued the business successfully for another sixteen years until it was sold in 1985 to Leah and Les Miller. The Millers ran the business at the same location but quickly realized the world was changing. Modern call-forwarding was coming, the answering service industry was changing and they believed strongly that the business needed to be computerized. Although their instincts were correct, they lacked the resources and the expertise to make the conversion. At that time installing a computerized client database and an electronic call distributor for an answering service was a complicated and expensive undertaking.

In 1987 the Millers sold Professional Communication Services to Ron Coffey who was then the majority stockholder of Kalama Telephone Company, the oldest family owned business in Cowlitz County. It was a logical choice. The roots of Kalama Telephone went all the way back to 1904 and Kalama Telephone had the resources to take PCS to the next level. The answering service was moved just down the street, this time to 711 Vandercook Way and a three position Startel system was installed about the same time. Now PCS had officially entered the computer age with a "paperless"messaging system. These years were a very busy time for PCS. We answered for ambulance, the cable TV company and handled all of the utility "call before you dig" locates for the entire county. In 1992, Ron retired and sold Kalama Telephone's telephone and paging businesses to outside investors, but the answering service part of Kalama was sold to Kurt and Carla Coffey, his son and daughter-in-law. [Photo: Taken in 1966, Lura Wheeler operates Kalama Tel switchboard with Darrell Coffey, owner and a young son Ron Coffey looking on. Ron owned PCS between 1987 and 1992.]

Kurt and Carla took PCS in a different direction. In 1992 they established a retail telephone store at 207 SW 7th Avenue in Kelso and ran the 24 hour answering service in the back offices of their store, all under the PCS umbrella. The retail side of the company specialized in cellular telephones (which was just taking off), paging equipment (which was a solid business at that time), cordless phones, decorative and novelty phones, and PCS even offered telephone repair services for their customers. The answering service and retail store was managed by Carla while Kurt handled the repairs and the technical aspects of their answering service. They made a good working team together and successfully managed PCS for fifteen years.

Over the years the retail phone and paging business gradually declined and the cellular telephone sales were taken over by the wireless carriers directly as they built their own captive retail stores in local malls and shopping centers. By 1999 the paging industry, after a steady erosion in unit margins and market share, more or less became unprofitable. Pagers were also being replaced by cellular phones, e-mail and other "high-tech" wireless devices. In addition, PCS customers were bringing in fewer phones for repair as they just purchased new ones online or from "discount retailers." After fifteen years, the retail store was closed in December of 2006.

In March of 2007, the Coffey's sold the answering service, the mainstay of PCS to its present owner Allgood Communications, Inc. of Pueblo, Colorado. Unlike most acquisitions of small answering services where clients phones are suddenly transferred and answered somewhere else by someone else... Allgood is fully committed to keeping PCS in Cowlitz County and retaining its local workforce. "There is a tremendous amount of customer knowledge and answering service experience in the existing staff" says Tom Sheridan, President of Allgood. "That level of customer service is very hard to find and replace," he added. Keeping the local presence and the employees not losing their jobs was essential to the Coffey's in their decision to sell PCS. Allgood's business philosophies and PCS made for a good fit and the transition went very smoothly. Allgood Communications also owns Executive Services Telephone Answering Service of Pueblo Colorado.

2007 was another year of transition and change for PCS. Allgood invested in the future of the company by relocating it to our present location at 755 Vandercook Way in Longview. For almost forty years the company has remained within the same single block area of where we are now. Our new facility is a first class call center and offers many new improvements for our clients and staff. It is light and bright and PCS is now even a more pleasant place to work. All calls received by PCS are routed through our Pueblo office. Even though we merged some of our operations and administrative functions when we moved, PCS is still managed locally and operated as a full service local office for calls originating in Southwest Washington and Oregon. PCS also has the latest in Call Management Technology as we are now on the Startel CMC platform. The CMC provides many advanced features such as group dispatch, messages on the Web, database management and e-mail response.

In 2007, our office in Pueblo became the 26th answering service in the United States to become Gold Site Certified by the Association of Teleservices International (ATSI). This Certification requires a physical inspection every three years and demonstrates that an answering service business has met or exceeded high standards in the following areas: Business practices, life safety, operations, including both normal and emergency procedures, personnel hiring, training and ongoing evaluations through a peer review program. The main focus of the Certification is on maintaining a 99.99% annual run time. Because of the availability of agents in two separate locations, we can back each other up when the weather gets bad. It's a great synergy because of the similar size service regions and the distance separating the two call centers. However, each location still handles most of their own calls. Our clients prefer the feeling of a local presence and the "high touch, high tech" reliable service that we offer.

Professional Communication Services' commitment is to provide the highest quality services to our clients. Together, we are able to offer greater reliability, innovative applications and quality answering services.

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