Case Studies : Outrigger Hotels & Resorts

In the early days of the company, all Outrigger guest reservations were handled at the Outrigger Waikiki where, in a small office behind the front desk, employees would hear the phone ring and yell, "I'll get it!" Those times have long since passed. Now fielding 3,000 inbound phone calls, 1,000 faxes, plus several hundred Internet customer chats each day, the hospitality company's customer contact center in Denver, Colorado employs 55 highly trained call center reservation agents who lead the South Pacific tourism industry in prompt, professional customer service.

It was Outrigger's continuing commitment to excellence that led it recently to upgrade its customer contact infrastructure.

"While we had always used the latest technology available, each separate channel—phone calls, email, fax and Web chat—was isolated both physically and technologically," said Bill Peters, vice president of reservation services for Outrigger Hotels and Resorts. "If call volumes went up, for example, we had to temporarily pull agents from doing another function to handle the calls."

Peters also knew that Outrigger's existing ACD (Automatic Call Distributor) system from Aspect was expensive to maintain. "We decided that a cutting-edge hosted contact solution was the answer. We wanted to lower our technology purchase and maintenance costs, plus create the new system that could also enable us to integrate all our inbound customer contact channels—not to mention adding new features and capacity whenever we needed it - which was impossible with the existing inflexible hardware," he stated.

Sophisticated, Reliable, On-Demand
With these goals in mind, Outrigger began looking for a Web-based, on demand call center service. Peters identified six different providers and was literally pen-in-hand to sign a contract with one of the companies when Sprint, the company's telecom network provider, asked, "Have you looked at Echopass?"

"On Sprint's recommendation we made the call," said Peters. "Echopass immediately scheduled a presentation with us. It was evident even in our initial discussion, that the Echopass service was a cut above everything we had seen to date."

Peters was impressed with the sophistication of the Echopass Contact Center On Demand solution. The reliability of Sprint and the Genesys routing technology embedded within the Echopass service, he said, combined with Echopass' highly-secured hosting facility in Salt Lake City, its flexible per-seat licensing program, and its Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telecom platform, would provide Outrigger the best possible infrastructure at the lowest possible overall cost.

"We recognize that companies like Outrigger are entrusting us with one of their most valuable assets—their customer communications," said Vincent Deschamps, Echopass chief executive officer. "Our goal is to provide the most reliable and flexible contact center solution available anywhere, which is why we have integrated our solutions with technology from partners like Sprint and Genesys, and why we built, own, and operate our own Network Operations Center."

After viewing the Echopass presentation, Outrigger changed its decision and chose Echopass Contact Center On Demand. Thirty days later, the system was installed, operating and already producing results.

High Performance And Immediate Results
One of the initial advantages Peters appreciated was the short learning curve of the new contact center solution. "The Contact Center On Demand onscreen interface is very intuitive. In fact, our agents spent more time learning the new VoIP softphone than they did training on the system software," Peters reported.

Almost immediately, Echopass Contact Center On Demand produced the efficiency Outrigger was looking for. "We quickly reached the 50 to 60 percentile range for conversion of calls to bookings—that's unusually strong for the hospitality industry," Peters said. In addition to meeting desired call center standards for transactions per hour, calls handled per hour, and average call answer times, Peters noted that Echopass Contact Center On Demand's ad hoc reporting features help keep the Outrigger's quality assurance efforts on track. Department supervisors can easily monitor both overall system and individual agent performance, ensuring consistently high service levels and pinpointing problem areas should they arise.

Echopass also eliminated a number of large unnecessary machines and related hardware that filled Outrigger's Denver Contact Center. Instead of using ACD equipment for phone calls, fax machines for travel agency bookings, and PCs for Internet chat and email, the center now houses only workstations and a single, router-based interface (see chart). All forms of inbound customer communications—voice, faxes, Internet "live help" chat and email—come from Echopass' Salt Lake City operations center where the core EchoSystem technology is integrated, delivered and managed.

Echopass intelligently routes inbound requests according to their particular requirements. Whether the contact is for corporate accounts, VIP lines or condominium reservations, all are quickly and efficiently forwarded to the appropriate service personnel. Even foreign language customers are connected with a third party, meta-ASP service qualified to handle them.