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Echopass Helps Delaware North Companies Parks & Resorts Counter Economic Downturn with Customer Survey

Hosted Contact Center Solution Delivers
Enhanced Customer Service, Boosts Employee Morale

PLEASANTON, Calif. —February 4, 2009 —Echopass Corporation, the number one provider of hosted contact center services to the enterprise market, today announced that Delaware North Companies Parks & Resorts has enhanced its contact center by moving to Echopass hosted Contact Center On-Demand solutions. Using a customer survey process that Echopass developed specifically for the company, Delaware North Parks & Resorts has seen its customer service and employee morale improve in spite of the downturn in the global economy.

“We moved to Echopass because we needed a contact center solution that aligns with our GuestPath® philosophy, which is all about creating special experiences one guest at a time,” said Sandra Levesque, director of reservations at Delaware North Companies Parks & Resorts. “To do that, we have to empower our associates with the knowledge, skills, and tools they need to deliver first-rate customer service. We’ve set the bar quite high, and Echopass is really the only contact center solution that meets our exacting standards.”

Vincent Deschamps, chief executive officer of Echopass Corporation, said, “Delaware North Parks & Resorts demonstrates how a customer-focused philosophy can help a company buck the broader, downward trend in today’s economy. The company keeps its focus squarely on its customers and evaluates everything — including enabling technologies — through that lens. The company’s success speaks volumes about the role customer service can play in establishing and maintaining competitive advantage.”

Echopass at Delaware North Parks & Resorts

The Delaware North Companies Parks & Resorts contact center in Fresno, California serves the company’s portfolio of owned and managed properties that includes hotels, resorts, and some of the nation’s greatest cultural icons and natural attractions, including Yosemite National Park. Each year, the contact center receives over 600,000 calls, with call volume climbing from 33,000 in December to nearly 100,000 in June. Ten percent of the calls are handled by interactive voice response (IVR). The bulk of the calls are handled by a pool of 70 to 100 contact center agents, who also handle thousands more customer interactions per month via web chat, e-mail, and fax.

To handle the fluctuating call load for a wide range of properties while maintaining its rigorous GuestPath® standard of customer service, Delaware North Companies Parks & Resorts moved from its premise-based contact center to Echopass. Before selecting Echopass, Delaware North Companies Parks & Resorts also investigated contact center solutions from Avaya and Cisco. However, only Echopass 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 its operations over to Echopass in January 2008. The Fresno contact center began taking calls the next morning, seamlessly. Highlights of the Echopass solution for Delaware North Companies Parks & Resorts include:

  • Flexibility. Contact center agents handle calls for many different properties, so the Echopass contact center solution is customized to meet the unique needs of each property — something the previous contact center solution didn’t support. For example, guests at one property now hear a message advising their call will be answered in less than one minute. At another property, a message only greets callers when the wait is over three minutes, and callers have the option of leaving a voicemail rather than staying on the line.
  • Scalability. The contracts that Delaware North Companies Parks & Resorts has with its properties all have different time frames. When a contract begins or ends, the contact center needs to quickly adjust. As an on-demand, hosted contact center solution, Echopass lets the contact center rapidly scale up or scale back its agent force in response to the company’s fluctuating property portfolio. Likewise, Echopass lets the company adjust the number of agents to handle seasonal fluctuations in call volumes.
  • Immediacy. To increase employee motivation and customer satisfaction, Delaware North Companies Parks & Resorts uses a unique self-designed, five-question, after call survey and feedback process, custom-built by Echopass to meet Delaware North’s needs. Now, contact center agents know immediately how they are doing when callers opt to take a one-minute, IVR survey about their contact center experience, including their agent’s friendliness and competency. Right after the customer takes the survey, the results are displayed via a pop-up screen to the agent who spoke with the customer, creating a positive feedback loop that improves motivation and service. The guest is also offered the opportunity to leave a voice-mail message and receive a call-back from a manager.

Levesque said, “The surveys have just been invaluable. The agents love them, and we’ve had rave reviews 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.”

The Echopass hosted contact center provides other advantages to Delaware North Companies Parks & Resorts as well. The company can now track its marketing campaigns across all of its properties, whether calls are handled in Fresno by the contact center or on site at the individual property. In addition, the company now uses IVR to let customers self-route their calls based on factors such as agent skills, individual property, property type, and more. The company is also using Echopass’ call recording and monitoring applications for quality control and training purposes.

For more information on Delaware North Companies Parks & Resorts, please visit http://www.experiencednc.com. For more information on Echopass, please visit www.echopass.com.

Echopass News and Resources

News releases:

Commentary:

  • From Meltdown to Breakout: Financial Services Prepares for Customer Service Overhaul; by Echopass CEO Vincent Deschamps;

 

About Delaware North Companies Parks & Resorts

Delaware North Companies Parks & Resorts is a subsidiary of Delaware North Companies, a leading hospitality provider with significant experience in hotel, retail, food service, recreation and transportation operations. The company’s portfolio includes historic properties in North America, such as Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex; Yosemite, Sequoia, Yellowstone and Grand Canyon National Parks; Asilomar State Beach and Conference Grounds; Tenaya Lodge; Harrison Hot Springs Resort & Spa; Niagara Falls State Park; Jones Beach; Plaza del Pasado in Old Town San Diego State Historic Park; The Lodge at Geneva-on-the-Lake; The Balsams Grand Resort Hotel; and Gideon Putnam Resort.  To learn more about Delaware North Companies’ expertise in the hospitality industry, visit http://www.experiencednc.com/.

About Echopass Corporation

Echopass Corporation is the #1 provider of hosted contact center services to the enterprise market, delivered through its unique EchoSystem™ Service Integration Platform. Only Echopass delivers the promise of On-Demand, Always On, Guaranteed, and End-to-End solutions that are both affordable and fully integrated with clients’ existing customer contact applications and voice or data technologies. Echopass managed solutions are quick to deploy, easy to use, flexible, and require no capital investment or ongoing maintenance. Privately-held Echopass, backed by venture capital firms Canaan Partners and New Enterprise Associates, is a recipient of numerous industry awards for innovation and customer service, including the Frost & Sullivan 2008 Customer Service Leadership and Red Herring Top 100 Companies awards. The company is headquartered in Pleasanton, CA. For additional information, please visit www.echopass.com or call 1-888-622-5345.

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Echopass and Echopass products are registered trademarks of Echopass Corporation. All other trademarks and service marks are the property of their respective owners.

Media Contact:

Laura Paden
TECHMarket Communications
818-597-0480
Laura@TECHMarket.com



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