Since Taupo Tandem Skydiving was established in 1992, the business has made a point of adopting new technology to offer a better service to its customers.

Marketing Manager Fritz Fröhlke says Telecom’s Mobile Broadband is helping provide a more efficient booking system to get customers in the air, and out of the plane, that much faster.

Establishing a database
“We used to have a paper-based system for our reservations. Our staff would take calls from customers and then have to cross-reference their queries against the office diary and, if there was an opening, enter the booking.

“But the diary was heavy, cumbersome and virtually impossible to mine for information. So we established a database that stored all our bookings, cross-referencing them with prices and weather postponements. This has meant our bookings information is always up-to-date and we can search it for information about bad weather days and corresponding cancelled bookings.

“Once this was up and running, we needed a way of entering after-hours bookings requests into the database immediately and providing a range of jump times and prices to the customer there and then.”

Bringing the database to life
“Telecom provided us with Harrier PDAs (personal digital assistants) and a Mobile Broadband connection. This means our reservations staff can bring up the database pages on their Harrier and make the bookings while speaking with the customer on the phone.

“What’s made the service really work is the high speed of Mobile Broadband. There are three web pages to go through – what’s available, the reservation page and the confirmation page – each of which can take up to 20 seconds to upload using slower networks. It doesn’t sound like a long time but when you’ve got a customer on the phone, it’s an eternity.”

Instantaneous solution
“Mobile Broadband lets us switch between these pages almost instantaneously. Not only is it more professional, it means our customers only have one call to make to research available times, book their preferences and confirm them. It also lets us process more reservations each day, which is really important when you’ve got more than 200 reservations to get through each day during the summer.

“While customers will soon be able to book their own jumps with an online reservation service, obviously some customers will still want to speak to somebody in person and the Harriers will come in handy for these inquiries. But even without this online service, we’re noticing our phone bills have reduced because we don’t have to call customers back with a list of available times.

“We’re not a large business but our customers expect us to be as responsive as one. If you can’t answer their queries accurately and immediately, people will start looking elsewhere. Luckily, Mobile Broadband and our Harrier PDAs have given us a mobile call centre at a fraction of the price.”

August 2006