Lines of Fire

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."

Unlike Gordon Petrie, Don Carlberg didn't need a big-picture view; rather, he needed something that would help him bring his entrepreneurial vision into focus. Casting about for a business model for a new high-tech health-care company, he asked himself this question: "What single piece of technology can be used by virtually anyone, is instantaneous, and is two-way?" He takes pleasure in pointing out that the answer is not the Internet but the telephone, and that's why his company, three-year-old Patient Infosystems, in Rochester, N.Y., revolves around call-center technology--combining such cutting-edge applications as interactive voice response (IVR), computer telephony integration (CTI), preview dialing, on-demand publishing, and artificial intelligence. Notes call-center manager Betty Ann Brunton, "We have a lot of technology for a small company, with a lot of capability. And we are anxious to use it."

Simply put, Patient Infosystems, which has 75 employees, uses the telephone to help patients take better care of themselves. The idea for it sprang from a growing body of scientific research that documents how people are often more comfortable talking about sensitive medical issues to an automated telephone system than they are to a live person. Studies have shown that individuals will divulge more intimate personal details to a computer-generated voice asking questions (IVR) than they will to a real human being on the other end of the line.

Patient Infosystems exploits that preference to tackle a thorny issue bedeviling the health-care community. Despite the fact that doctors and health-care providers have more expertise than ever and that more people are better informed about health, health risks, and unhealthful behavior, between 30% and 60% of patients nonetheless don't comply with their prescribed treatment. That has at least two negative consequences that Patient Infosystems aims to address: patients don't get well, and health-care costs go up.

Patient Infosystems uses its elaborate call center to conduct regularly scheduled interviews with various patient populations--asthmatics, diabetics, those suffering from heart disease, for example--to gather information about how those people are managing their diseases and their treatment plans. The phone system, which is hooked up to the company's patient database (hence the CTI), automatically uses the patient feedback gathered in the "conversation" to generate customized, personal reports (on-demand publishing) that employees of Patient Infosystems then mail or in some instances fax to the patients and their doctors. The patients' health-care providers foot the bill for the service, whose cost varies according to the frequency of calls and the nature of the disease but in general runs from $12 to $16 a session.

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