By now most people have read or heard about the back-to-back blizzards that brought Denver to its knees over the holidays. The timing was horrible. Just as holiday season travel was getting under way a few days before Christmas, it ground to a halt as the blizzard of 2006 blew into Denver and kept piling up the snow for three days. It just would not let up. The following excerpts from and paraphrases of news reports speak for themselves.

  • Denver International Airport (DIA) – once touted as storm-proof – closed Wednesday afternoon, December 20, and a spokesman said it would not reopen until noon Friday, December 22.
  • Thousands of travelers were stranded at DIA when their flights were canceled.
  • City officials organized convoys of 10 buses, led by a snowplow, to take stranded airport travelers to hotels 25 miles away in downtown Denver.
  • Holiday mail delivery across the Denver region was suspended for days due to postal employees not being able to make it to and from work.
  • Many malls were closed on what should have been some of the busiest shopping days of the year due to employees not being able to make it to and from work.
  • The storm also shut down I-70 and I-25, the major east-west and north-south routes through Denver.
  • Travelers coming from other cities had their flights canceled with no alternative transportation available.
  • Stranded passengers with cancelled flights had a hard time getting through to most airline 800 numbers.
  • At some airlines, the wait in queue to get to a desk agent was over three hours.
  • The major airline reservation centers in Denver were not fully staffed because employees could not make it to work from their homes and those who were already at work when the storm began were burning out from the hundreds of calls they were handling.

I am proud to say that this chaotic scene was NOT repeated at the Outrigger Contact Center in Denver. The center’s performance was excellent, and the operation did not miss a beat. The reason for this is that about a year and a half ago we decided to implement new technology that has made it possible for many of our employees to work from the comfort and safety of their homes. This new technology is a hosted contact solution by Echopass. Every customer interaction, voice, fax, email, Internet chat, is directed to the Echopass datacenter located in Salt Lake City, Utah. Echopass than electronically delivers each customer interaction to the proper Outrigger agent via a skill based routing protocol using the Voice over the Internet Protocol, VOIP.

Shannon Nolder, Wholesale Supervisor - Bill Peters, Mr. Hollywood – Kristine Renneau, Retail Team Lead - Hyacinth Millington, Human Resource Assistant

In our case, the timing of the storm was actually very fortunate, because it was just three weeks earlier that we had finished enabling the entire night crew, those working from 9 p.m. to 2 a.m., to work from home. This gave us the opportunity to close our “bricks and mortar” operation at 9 p.m. every night while continuing to keep the business running until our usual 2 a.m. closing time. Unfortunately the total solution is not yet in place, and the day crew still needs to work out of our “bricks and mortar” offices until a few more issues are resolved.

The first morning of the storm our Chairman Dr. Richard Kelley called me on my cell phone to see how things were going. He offered to “four-wheel it” into the office to help take reservations if needed. I was happy to tell him that it would not be necessary because we were properly staffed and that 76 percent of all calls were being answered within 20 seconds. Our benchmark on a normal day is 80 percent, so we were doing really well. However, I assured him that if we needed him I would call and maybe in the future set up a workstation in his home –just jokingly, of course.

A few hours later I received an e-mail from our President and CEO, David Carey asking how the gang was holding up. He was in town to attend his daughter’s college graduation, which was cancelled due to the storm, so he was shoveling out a three-foot snow drift in his sister’s driveway. He also said that he now remembered another of the things he loves about Hawaii – NO SNOW!

The center had actually opened as usual that morning, and all the day-shift employees made it in to work. The snow did not get bad until later in the morning and that’s when we put our snow emergency plan into effect. We reserved a block of rooms at the nearby Radisson Hotel for any of our day crew who were willing and could stay over that evening. This would keep our day shift staffed for the next few days. Understandably, some day-shift staff members could not stay over because of family care or doggy care issues. However, since we could get our work-from-home agents online early, we were able to let those who needed to get home leave early enough so they would not get stranded. The rest of the day crew, who would be staying nearby overnight, continued to man the bricks-and-mortar operation until 3:30 p.m. when the work-from-home agents took over for the evening. These agents put in a lot of overtime, but because they did, we had a lot of flexibility with our bricks-and-mortar day-shift agents. The bricks-and-mortar agents wound up staying at the hotel for two evenings. Even though the hotel was only about two miles away they had to struggle back to the office in the morning through two to three feet of snow. The first morning they had to park two blocks away and walk the rest of the way to the office on sidewalks that were not yet shoveled.

Once the bricks-and-mortar center closed at 3:30 p.m., the operation was run completely from home. All the agents who were equipped to work from home were on the phones, answering e-mails, answering faxes and doing live Internet chats until the business closed at its regular 2 a.m. time. We also asked a few of those at-home agents to double back for a few hours at 7 a.m. since we wanted to ensure that we opened on a timely basis and did not know how difficult it would be for the day crew to make it back to work from the hotel. It was a good call because the day after that first night in the hotel was really the hardest time to get in and they did not make it until 9 a.m. However, our customers did not know the difference because our work-from-home agents started up the operation on time, and before it got very busy the day crew was in.

Even before the first storm was over the second storm was blowing in. This time we changed our plans a little to allow those who needed to finally go home to do so; instead, we relied on our work-from-home agents to put in even more overtime, which they did.

Thanks to the new technology and most of all, to the dedication of our staff, the center did not miss a beat in conducting business during one of the worst snow storms to hit the Denver area in years.

As I write this another storm has blown into Denver. Three storms in three weeks, very unusual but we are prepared thanks to our new and exciting technology that gives us Voice over the Internet Protocol, VOIP, even when cell phones are tied up.

William D. Peters
Vice President Reservation Services
303-743-3219
Outrigger