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. With a reputation as a global leader in hospitality, Delaware North Companies’ newest operating company, Delaware North Companies Parks & Resorts, relies on an on-demand hosted contact center from Echopass to help them exceed guest expectations and 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

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