To qualify for inclusion in this year’s "Top 50," the agencies had to answer a questionnaire detailing the nature of their business and listing their number of billable minutes between November 1996 and October 1997. The questionnaire had to be verified with the signature of each agency’s president/CEO. In addition, each agency had to submit a letter of verification from each of its telephone service providers certifying the number of minutes for which it billed the agency during the designated period. (Our sincere gratitude is extended to all the carriers for their thorough and expeditious provision of this data.)

Agencies that did not supply this third-party verification were disqualified, with the exception of three circumstances: 1) a client of the service agency was billed directly for its telephone service and would not provide a letter of verification for anonymity reasons; 2) part of the billable minutes were with a foreign telecommunications carrier that could not provide the data by the deadline; 3) legitimate business situations prevented an agency from obtaining verification from certain of its carriers or a certain carrier. For each of these circumstances, we required a letter of explanation and signed verification of billable minutes pertaining to the explanation from the president/CEO of the agency. You will find an asterisk next to the name of all "Top 50" agencies that supplied a portion of their verification from their president/CEO due to one of the three circumstances identified above.

In all cases, from the questionnaires to the letters of verification, the agencies were warned that should falsification be detected, they would be disqualified from this and all future "Top 50" rankings. And indeed, C@LL CENTER Solutions^TM magazine’s editorial staff carefully verified calculations, discrepancies and other aspects of the supplied information to ensure that this ranking is of true value to you.

As you read through the following list of "Top 50" agencies, you will notice that we have provided a numerical ranking of 1 through 50 (1 being the largest), but have not revealed the number of billable minutes used to arrive at this ordering. This was done out of respect for the confidential nature of this information to the many agencies included here that are privately held corporations.

In addition to the rankings, we have provided background information on the agencies, such as number of call centers and last year’s ranking in the "Top 50" (where applicable) to give you a broader picture of each agency and help you narrow down your selections. It is important to note that information provided under the category of "Specialization" is reflective of both the agency’s inbound and outbound work.

You will notice that the "Top 50" inbound has been divided into four categories: A, B, C and D.

• Category A is composed of U.S. service agencies whose primary business function is provision of telemarketing services for outside firms.
• Category B was created seven years ago to let readers know that companies ranked in this section do 50 percent or more of their telemarketing for a parent company or a company that owns an interest in their agency. As always, we feel that companies in Category B deserve "Top 50" recognition for the notable contributions they make to the telemarketing industry. It is important to note that companies in Category B have all indicated that they can accept new clients, so don’t hesitate to call on them as you would any of the companies listed in Category A.
  
  If you are considering an international telemarketing campaign,
• Category C consists of international service agencies. Again this year we have separated out all international telemarketing done by U.S. agencies and ranked those companies’ international minutes in the International category, Category C. Domestic companies that are also ranked in the International category are marked with a dagger (†) in their domestic ranking..
  
  This year we have added a new category,
• Category D, which is comprised of companies that provide purely interactive inbound services (no live operators). We added this category to reflect the growing demand for such interactive inbound services. Companies that are in the Domestic and International categories that are also ranked in the Interactive category are marked with a double dagger (‡) in their Domestic and International rankings.