As corporations grew and labor rates increased, the ratio of secretaries to employees decreased.
PageNet was one of the larger paging providers who offered this service add-on to their alphanumeric pager customers.
As the use of alphanumeric pagers declined in the mid-1990s and cell phone text messaging availability and reliability increased ever since, these well-established alpha-dispatch call centers adjusted their technology to allow live operators' messages to be transmitted to cellular service providers in the same way as to pager service providers.
Operators still follow the same answering procedures and have no idea if the subscriber is receiving the text message on a cell phone or a pager.
Operator messaging service providers remain profitable because the average call length is under 30 seconds and employees are often paid less than full-service answering service employees due to the limited training required.