Lines of Fire

These days the reservation center at Jacobs' Golf hums with quiet efficiency--even though the company booked a record 20,000 students into lessons last year. Much like the sales reps at Famous Smoke Shop, the five customer-service reps sit in a row of cubicles, chatting into their headsets as their fingers fly over their keyboards and navigate the point-and-click user interface of the company's proprietary customer-reservation system (from Stoneman Software), which runs on an ALR server. The reservation system's database, which is separate from but operates in tandem with the call center, not only has taken the place of the unwieldy ledger but also allows the reps to live up to their customer-service titles: in addition to 250,000 customer profiles and information on 1,589 golf-school classes, the database contains the answers to customers' most frequently asked questions, whether they're about the average daily temperature of San Diego in January or the handicaps of students enrolled in a particular class.

While managers and employees alike would agree that the ACD has made life more pleasant at Jacobs' Golf, adapting to the system was no picnic. For starters, within minutes of installation on the company's server, the Windows-based software, called Prelude (from Cintech, 800-833-3900), revealed an alarming problem: the number of hang-ups was sky-high. "We never knew before how long we kept people on hold or how many calls we were losing, and when we saw that, we got scared," recalls former executive vice-president John Fechter.

Jacobs' Golf's early experience with its call center recalled the flip side of the adage "What you don't know can't hurt you": it felt like an expensive way to receive bad news. The company had spent $11,225 on the Prelude package, which had the capacity for 15 agents to handle up to 30 incoming calls at any given time, as well as an additional $32,000 on 30 new telephones and a complete rewiring of its phone system, by the time the reason for the lost calls was revealed: upon answering a call, Prelude would automatically bump callers into a voice-mail menu, regardless of whether a live operator was free. That, apparently, was unacceptable to customers, who would hang up after waiting too long in a queue. "And we knew when they hung up they were calling the next golf school on their list," notes Petrie. With the average price of a Jacobs' golf package running at $1,000, the opportunity cost of the lost calls was considerable.

The company decided on the spot that it needed to upgrade to a more robust system with more features, specifically the ability for callers to be directed immediately to a live operator when one was available. It decided to continue with another Cintech product, the Windows-based Cinphony, which in addition to the live-operator feature has the capacity for 30 agents to handle up to 80 incoming lines. (After some haggling, Cintech's local distributor agreed to accept the price of the upgraded software--$16,800--as payment in full.) Both Fechter and Marlene Pierce, reservations manager for Jacobs' Golf, arranged to have monitors in their offices to observe the call center's activity--so they could keep an eye on such statistics as average time on hold (the company's goal is a minute and a half), average daily hang-up rate (the goal is no more than 10%), and how many agents were on the phone at a given time.

But the opportunities provided by the call center didn't end there: the software's ability to track call-center activity in such detail inspired Jacobs' Golf to fine-tune its staffing levels. The process, by necessity, was one of trial and error. In an effort to reduce the time customers spent on hold, the number of reps was initially raised from five to eight. Then, when the monitoring software indicated to Pierce how frequently reps were "unavailable"--versus on a call or ready to receive one--because they were engaged in follow-up duties (such as mailing confirmations), it became clear that it made more sense to break out the follow-up responsibilities into a separate job. So the company added two new administrative positions and reduced the number of agents by two, from eight to six. Now, with weekly volume ranging from 2,200 to 2,500 calls, the call center is handling between two and three times the number of calls it did a year ago--with two fewer reps. Pierce estimates that bookings are up 15% from a year ago, thanks to increased efficiencies afforded by the call center.

The ACD's reporting capabilities have also led Jacobs' Golf to alter the hours of operation of the center. Though peak calling time consistently remains Monday mornings, with call volume declining gradually throughout the week, the company added Saturday hours and began gearing up for Sundays after the system revealed as many as 180 calls coming in on a weekend day. And after Cinphony revealed the surprising number of customers who called Jacobs' Golf between midnight and 6 a.m., the company made plans for a fax-on-demand service that will operate around the clock.

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