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.
In fact, the installation of the call center sparked an overall effort by the company to refine how it operates its business. Though Jacobs' Golf has never had a bad year since its inception, in 1971, Petrie concedes, "We've been growing in spite of ourselves." The company, which has more than $20 million in revenues, can't afford to be complacent in a market in which the number of customers remains stagnant (according to the National Golf Foundation, the number of golfers in the United States has hovered between 24 million and 25 million since 1991) and new competitors lurk behind every bunker.
So Fechter, inspired by the call center's ability to help tighten up staffing and scheduling, dove into an analysis of the company's phone bills and database records, hoping to maximize its marketing efforts. Since the Cintech package that Jacobs' Golf chose lacks caller ID but can report which number the caller dialed (dialed-number identification service, or DNIS), Fechter decided to assign a separate 800 number to every direct-mail campaign or advertisement the company ran. Jacobs' Golf now has more than 50 toll-free numbers, up from 3 a year ago, and can, by using the reservations database and drilling down into the company's call records, analyze the number of bookings by state, among other things. "If the ad budget to Georgia goes up and catalog requests go up but bookings go down, the company now creates the red flags to detect this," notes Fechter, an M.B.A. who clearly relishes the idea of regression analysis.
Fechter's efforts have already paid off. For example, the company discovered that golfers from Arizona were the second-largest group of bookers (behind Californians) in its schools, so for the first time in its history it took out ads in some of the local golf publications there. The result? The number of students from Arizona doubled from the previous year--to 1,600 last year. Developments like that, on top of the obvious benefits of picking up more incoming calls through better staffing and scheduling, make Jacobs' Golf consider its call center more than worth the expense and effort. "In terms of our ability to serve the customer, it paid for itself instantly," says Fechter. Adds Petrie, "It feels so much more comfortable knowing how you're really performing."
