The fact that the cigar industry began turning red-hot in 1993 (consumption has increased 68% since then, according to the U.S. Agriculture Department) magnified the severity of Famous's customer-service problems. So in early 1996, after a particularly stressful Christmas season, Zaretsky desperately started reading every telecommunications journal he could get his hands on. He still remembers the name of the author whose article in Operations and Fulfillment magazine hit him like an epiphany. "Curtis Barry. And he said, 'If you have this problem and that problem, then what you need is an ACD,' " recalls Zaretsky. "I didn't know what an ACD was; I just knew that I needed one."
The ACD he chose after nearly a year of research was Distributed Call Center (from Teloquent Communications, 800-468-6434, $1,750 per agent) because, he says, its applications were the most "open, expandable, and flexible" within his price range. "This is not a product in a box but a software system that can be modified," he says of his Teloquent system, which is Unix-based and resides on a Compaq Prolinea 575. Once the ACD was installed, "all of a sudden new possibilities began to emerge," Zaretsky recalls. For example, originally the system offered a customer three choices in its voice-driven menu--catalog requests, order placement, or returns--but after a while it became apparent that the company needed a fourth option, for callers interested in cigar resale. "Storekeepers are interested not in consuming the product but in how much profit they can make on it," explains Zaretsky.
Thanks to the easy-to-use software, adding another option to the voice menu is simply a matter of dragging a few icons on a PC screen and making a new recording in the voice-mail system. In fact, making changes to the system is so easy that call-center manager Humberto Gonzalez--a self-confessed techno-neophyte--tinkers with it all the time. Zaretsky has been so encouraged by the traffic generated by wholesale callers that he has set up a separate 800 number for them, and he's building a Web site just for distributors as well. "I can have as many businesses as I want with this thing," he muses.
Other customer-service improvements followed once the system revealed specific caller habits. For example, after it showed Gonzalez that callers using rotary phones were likely to hang up sooner than those using Touch-Tone ones, he reconfigured the system to give priority to the rotary dialers, permitting them to "jump the queue," in call-center argot. He also enabled callers to select a particular rep ("press one for Joe, two for Susan") after noticing that repeat customers would frequently request reps by name. Customers' befriending of reps was a luxury the company could never have afforded in its pre-ACD days. Paradoxically, switching from wholly live operators to an automated system has made Famous's relationships with its customers more, as opposed to less, intimate. It's a trend the ICMI's Brad Cleveland has observed as well. When used effectively, he says, call centers can be "great loyalizing tools."
Consider the experience of Famous customer Mike Genova. At the suggestion of a sales rep, he registered his 20 favorite cigars in a special folder on Famous's Web site. Famous, in turn, routinely sends him E-mail notifying him when his choices are in stock, suggesting alternatives when they're not, and alerting him to weekly specials. To judge by comments Genova posted in a cigar smoker's newsgroup (alt.smokers.cigars), he's a big fan of this E-mail, which seems to keep him coming back for more. Genova writes:
Famous is killing me! Today I got an Email listing the Fuentes in my favorites folder that they just received today. The sigs [sic] were in and gone in half an hour, but they still had Cuban Coronas in maduro. Got a box of those. Three hours later, I get another Email, this time they got LGC's [La Gloria Cubanas] in. I had to order again, a box of Churchill Maduros. It's too damn easy!
No stranger to this "loyalizing" effect, Famous has a full-time employee dedicated to the task of keeping the Mike Genovas of the world happy. Long before it was fashionable to do so in call-center circles, Famous treated each E-mail message it received as a legitimate customer contact. "E-mail queen" Amy Collazo gets 50 to 150 E-mail messages daily and makes a habit of responding to them in 24 hours and often on the same day.
Life with a call center hasn't always treated Famous so well. For example, Zaretsky had to wait more than a year for his local phone company to figure out how to reprogram his ISDN line to allow call monitoring--a feature of the Teloquent system that enables Gonzalez to listen in on new reps' conversations with customers during their initial training. (This contrasts dramatically with the old method of training reps--"throwing anybody who walked in the door immediately on the phones," notes Zaretsky.) The experience, he says, was "a horror story."
Regardless, Zaretsky thinks the approximately $45,000 he's invested in his call center over the past three and a half years has been well worth it. "Revenues have gone up tremendously, our employees are much more comfortable, we're handling calls more efficiently, and our customers have a better perception of us," he says.
Other than a fine cigar, what more could anyone ask for?
Alessandra Bianchi is a contributing writer at Inc.
DEFINITION DIRECTORY
AUTOMATIC CALL DISTRIBUTOR (ACD): A specialized telephone system that automatically answers, queues, and routes incoming calls to agents; plays announcements; and provides analytic reports about callers' activities
