(FORTUNE Magazine) – Say you just bought one of those new 18-inch RCA satellite dishes off the shelf at Sears, and you can't figure out how to install it from the directions. Or you received the latest software on a CD-ROM in the mail from Apple, and you need the de-encryption code to download it. Maybe you can find a cheaper flight on Continental if you go through Phoenix. In each of these cases, you'd dial an 800 number to get the answer -- and odds are, you'd speak not to the company itself but to one of Ken Tuchman's 1,250 employees at TeleTech, an outfit that handles customer calls for 35 big corporations. Working out of Denver and Sherman Oaks, California, Tuchman's telephone teams take some 100,000 calls a day, answering questions and solving problems with the help of databases that display detailed product information along with thousands of responses scripted by TeleTech and its clients. Says Tuchman, 35: "The only way a company can compete successfully today is to keep its prospective customers informed. We facilitate communications for our clients all the way through the life cycle of the customer." This has proved to be a recipe for growth. TeleTech revenues for 1994 should hit $38 million, vs. $20 million in 1993. Tuchman won't disclose earnings but says the company is "nicely profitable." Tuchman, who grew up in Malibu, California, where his father was a real estate developer, got a fairly unusual start in business. At 15, while attending high school, he left the surf shop where he had signed on as a salesman as a way to "get chicks," and began to import Philippine puka shells. Those tiny white mollusks, used in the necklaces surfers wore, then took off as a Seventies fashion fad among the young women he admired. Before long he was one of the largest importers of puka shells, with J.C. Penney and Pier 1 Imports among his customers. At 17, Tuchman moved on to found three other small businesses, selling Christmas trees and luxury cars and developing an electronic yellow pages. "My main strength is marketing," Tuchman says. Example: His Christmas tree outfit sold only high-end trees, and in exchange for a weekly plug during the sermon, he donated $5 on each sale to local churches. By 1982, he was also a partner in his dad's real estate business, which specialized in building homes for the rich and famous. For Tuchman, finding an unfilled niche in which to start a business as an entrepreneur was as easy as determining what he lacked as a consumer. As a developer, he noticed there was something missing in the link between companies and potential consumers who respond to direct advertising. Says he: "You would read these trade journals that would talk about new types of air conditioning, new types of solar, new types of roofing, etc., and you'd get all excited, and you'd send away for information. Thirty weeks later, a salesperson would show up at your job site. He was always too late. The house was finished and going on the block."

THINKING other industries might have the same problem, Tuchman hired market researchers who polled the top 200 ad agencies and the top 500 corporations on their direct-marketing process. The results revealed a definite need for open, real-time lines of communication with customers. Tuchman sunk about $250,000 ! (some of it from selling his other businesses), got bank loans, and purchased the best technology he could afford to furnish his first call center, located in an abandoned nursery school in Encino. "When clients came across the threshold, they literally walked across a hopscotch area, and when they went to the bathroom, the toilets were about 12 inches off the ground." His first contracts focused on sales, which included signing up long-distance customers for ITT Communications and taking orders for Greenpeace calendars. In the first year TeleTech realized $1 million in revenues, but it was a scrape to get by. "This is a negative cash flow business, because you're billing your clients every 30 days, they're paying you every 45 days, which means 75 days have gone by before you see penny one. And you're paying your employees every two weeks and your phone bill every 30 days, and for TeleTech, those two items make up 68 to 72 cents on the dollar of revenue." An accounting firm told him that the company was technically bankrupt at one point in 1986, but Tuchman remained convinced that the company was onto something big. "If we can streamline the way our clients communicate with their customer base, we can make money for them. Every time." While most companies have radically improved their customer service since 1982, Tuchman still sees a niche TeleTech can fill and plans to open three more call centers next year. "We're pioneering an entirely new industry. This," he says, eyeing the clusters of employees working the phones and computers at his Denver office, "is the future of the majority of the blue- collar work force, as sad or as positive as that sounds. We're becoming more of a service-based society, and the tougher that consumer gets, the more people you're going to need on the phone."