With the global economy in recession, companies and consumers alike are tightening their belts. However, if a company cuts costs at the expense of customer service, the results can threaten both reputation and revenues. Delaware North Companies’ newest operating company, Delaware North Companies Parks & Resorts, relies on an on-demand hosted contact center from Echopass to meet business targets during an economic downturn.

Delaware North Companies Parks & Resorts was founded in 1992 after winning the bid to service the U.S. National Park Service’s largest contract — Yosemite National Park. Delaware North Companies Parks & Resorts has since emerged as an industry leader with a portfolio of owned and managed properties that includes hotels, resorts, and some of the nation’s greatest cultural icons and natural attractions. The company has also won awards for its environmental, recreation, marketing, restoration, culinary, and hotel management experience.

For many vacation planning customers and meeting attendees, the Delaware North Companies Parks & Resorts experience begins with a call to the company’s contact center in Fresno, California. Callers can make individual and group reservations for lodging, tours, and other property services. The contact center handles over 600,000 calls per year, with monthly call volume climbing from 33,000 in December to nearly 100,000 in June. While 10 percent of those calls are handled by self service through interactive voice response (IVR) technology, the bulk of the calls are handled by a pool of 70–100 contact center agents. In addition, these agents handle thousands more customer interactions per month via web chat and e-mail.

“We don’t have a specific customer service department,” explains Sandra Levesque, director of reservations at Delaware North Companies Parks & Resorts. “We don’t need it because of the GuestPath philosophy that runs through all Delaware North Companies. GuestPath reflects our commitment to provide every customer with a memorable experience and to empower our associates with the knowledge and skills they need to deliver first-rate customer service. GuestPath is the lens we use to evaluate everything we do as a company, including the move to bring in Echopass.”

Keys to First Rate Service
Before selecting Echopass, Delaware North Companies Parks & Resorts evaluated a number of premise-based and hosted contact center technologies, including solutions from Avaya and Cisco. However, none offered a fully integrated and end-to-end hosted solution that included all of the necessary features and capabilities required to ensure first rate customer service.

After just a 90-day implementation period, Delaware North Companies Parks & Resorts was ready to cut their operations over to Echopass in January 2008. The Fresno contact center began taking calls the next morning, seamlessly. Over the months since, Levesque has relied on Echopass to provide the contact center with several keys to delivering the first rate customer service for which Delaware North is known.

Be flexible. The Fresno contact center handles customer inquiries for properties owned by Delaware North Companies Parks & Resorts as well as other property owners. For that reason, Levesque cites flexibility as a primary advantage of the Echopass contact center solution, which can be customized on an individual basis to meet the needs of each property the contact center handles.

For example, guests calling for one property were used to calls being handled locally at the hotel. If their calls were not answered by an agent immediately, the guests hung up.

With Echopass, Delaware North could now advise the caller of the expected wait time and offer the guest the option of staying on the line for an agent or transferring to the hotel. For another property, if there is an anticipated delay of over two minutes, a message greets callers with the expected delay time and advises that they have the option of leaving a voicemail rather than staying on the line.

“Usually, people don’t announce when the wait is under a minute,” said Levesque. “But we needed to do it for that particular property. Elsewhere we might give callers the option of staying on the line or being transferred for faster service. We weren’t able to do that kind of hotel-by-hotel customization prior to Echopass.”

Track marketing. One particular strength of Delaware North Companies Parks & Resorts is its marketing. The company tracks its campaigns and knows what’s proving to be effective, whether calls are handled by the Fresno contact center or on site at the individual property. Using Echopass, the company links its marketing campaigns to unique telephone numbers, regardless of where the caller resides. With each phone number linked to a source code, Delaware North Companies Parks & Resorts is also able to link on the agent’s phone information for any number of specific marketing promotions, helping the agent to be better prepared for the call in advance.

Scale rapidly. As an on-demand, hosted contact center solution, Echopass lets Delaware North Companies Parks & Resorts rapidly scale up its agent force to handle growing call volume as the contact center answers calls for a growing number of properties. The company is also able to meet spikes in call volumes and then scale back when call volumes subside, all the while maintaining a minimal onsite IT support staff.

“We didn’t want to buy a system that was bigger than our needs, or would lock us into one location, or would be very expensive to relocate or move,” said Levesque. “Our contracts with our hotels all have different time frames. When a contract expires, we need to adjust to that very quickly. And when we bring a new property on board, we want to implement that as quickly as possible, too. Echopass gives us the ability to instantly respond to those changes.”

Survey customers. To measure customers’ satisfaction with the Fresno contact center — and increase employee motivation — Levesque developed a five-question, after call survey and commissioned Echopass to implement a system that would deliver this feedback immediately to the agent. Previously, contact center agents wouldn’t hear about a caller’s experience — positive or negative — unless a call was escalated to a manager. Now, agents learn immediately how they are doing as callers opt to take a one-minute, interactive survey about their contact center experience, including their agent’s friendliness and competency. Delaware North Companies Parks & Resorts also gives its customers the option of leaving a voicemail message, whether a complaint or a compliment.

Right after the customer takes the survey, the results are displayed via a pop-up screen to the agent who spoke with the customer. Contact center managers can track the results by agent or by property, while agents get immediate recognition that creates a positive feedback loop and improves both motivation and customer service.

“The surveys have just been invaluable, and the agents love them,” said Levesque. “And we’ve had raves on the voicemail. Most of the calls are compliments. But the system really pays off when we receive a complaint, because we are able to get back to those customers immediately and make things right. It’s really fantastic in regard to service recovery.”

Innovate with IVR. Delaware North Companies Parks & Resorts relies on Echopass’ IVR to let customers self-route approximately 10 percent of the calls at its Fresno contact center. Most of that activity is redirecting calls to the correct agent or to another facility. For instance, some properties do not book their spa reservations at the Fresno contact center, and the call is re-routed based on the caller’s IVR selection.

IVR is new to the Fresno contact center, which now lets customers self-route to the right agent based on agent skills, individual property, property type, and more. Levesque reports that callers are happy because the agents answering the calls are equipped to help them. The IVR also frees more agents for other callers who experience shorter wait times. Meanwhile, agents don’t have to spend several minutes with a customer to identify why he or she is calling, only to discover they can’t help and therefore must transfer the customer.

“We’re using IVR, but we’re not using it the way a lot of other companies do,” said Levesque. “We’re in the business of talking to our customers, so we use IVR as a means of effective call routing, making sure that our customers get the best possible service from the most appropriate agent.”

Record calls. The Fresno contact center uses Echopass’ call recording and monitoring applications for quality control and training purposes. For example, Levesque can listen to a recording left by a satisfied or disgruntled guest and, based on the time stamp, review the customer’s original call with the agent. If the call was excellent, it too can be flagged as a model for coaching purposes. If the call was poorly handled, agents are coached to handle similar calls more appropriately.

First Rate Results

With the Echopass solution in place, Delaware North Companies Parks & Resorts can now effectively measure customer satisfaction with its Fresno contact center, which is averaging 95 percent. The contact center handled 15 percent more calls in 2008 than it did in 2007, quite a feat considering the slowing economy. In addition, the company generated 30 percent more business in the first half of 2008 compared to the first half of 2007.

At Delaware North Companies, the ultimate test is how any technology serves the GuestPath® mission. Here, Levesque recalls how the contact center was able to keep customers in Yosemite fully informed during the summer wildfires of 2008.

“Right outside Yosemite in Mariposa, we had 38,000 acres burn, and we needed to respond to that information really quickly,” she said. “We put out special messages on the Echopass IVR so callers would get fire related data instantly, but we also let callers speak to an agent for more information without tying up our phone lines for guests who were calling to book hotel rooms for other times of the year. So, we were able to help everybody by using different priorities for different callers. Echopass features like these have really helped us build and sustain our competitive advantage.”