Free Sample
The Complete Guide to Becoming A Switchboard Operator, Including Answering Service
The honest, numbers-based guide to the pay, daily reality, and career path of switchboard and answering service operators — so you can decide if it's right for you before you invest a single dollar in training.
by Alumigogo Books
Chapter 1: What Does a Switchboard Operator, Including Answering Service Actually Do?
When you imagine a switchboard operator, you might picture someone from a 1950s movie, plugging cords into a massive wall of jacks. That image is decades out of date. The modern switchboard operator is less about physical plugs and more about being the human traffic controller for a business's phone lines. You are the first voice a caller hears, the person who decides where a call goes next, and often the one who handles the call entirely if it's a routine question.
The core of the job is simple to describe: you answer incoming calls, you route them to the right person or department, and you handle a range of other tasks that revolve around communication. But the reality of the job is far more varied than that sentence implies, because the actual work depends heavily on where you're employed. A switchboard operator at a small law firm does very different work than one at a busy hospital or at a dedicated answering service company.
Let's start with the most common and generalized version: the corporate or business switchboard operator. You sit at a desk with a headset and a computer. The heart of your toolkit is a software-based phone system, often from a company like Avaya or Cisco, or a smaller cloud-based system like RingCentral or Five9. The old physical switchboard with cords is nearly extinct; the "switchboard" is now a screen on your monitor showing active