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About Five Iron Golf
Headquartered in New York City, Five Iron Golf is blurring the lines between indoor golf and entertainment. State-of-the-art simulators and world-class instruction meet premium events and amenities plus delectable food and cocktail menus. Five Iron fosters a dynamic, engaging, and fun atmosphere for golf enthusiasts and partygoers alike.
Overview
Five Iron Golf (5i), known for its indoor golf locations, needed to modernize its contact center to improve customer service and reduce costs. The company’s service representatives spent too much time switching between channels when resolving issues. Plus, its legacy system didn’t integrate with 5i’s point-of-sale (POS) solution. As a longtime customer of Amazon Web Services (AWS), the team wanted an AWS-based contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) solution and a trusted AWS partner. 5i chose AWS Partner Local Measure and implemented its Engage pre-built contact center platform, resulting in three times fewer refund requests that needed multiple interactions, as well as an 80 percent growth-adjusted reduction in customer service expenses.
Opportunity | Tallying up Call Center Costs and Inefficiencies
Aiming to make golf more accessible to all, 5i locations feature state-of-the-art indoor golf simulators where groups and individuals can get into the swing of golf. The spaces cater to serious golfers and enthusiasts alike and 5i offers a range of memberships and bookings to meet the needs of its diverse customer base. When customers want to set up their account, plan an event, or troubleshoot an issue, they typically call in or reach out to 5i’s customer service representatives via social media.
The 5i finance department noticed its service department had outsized expenses and had a high headcount compared to the rest of the business. Looking into it further, service representatives often had to switch between various social media platforms, phones, and a POS system to address customers’ issues, resulting in inefficient workflows and slow resolution times. “There were a lot of dropped balls with resolutions, and that’s a real pain point from the customer experience point of view,” said Elric Kline, SVP of business intelligence and accounting at 5i. Every time a service representative needed to confirm a customer’s account status or purchase history, they had to comb through a separate program, which opened the process up to typos and errors. “Our POS system is very niche with a clunky API that required a flexible, extensible CCaaS platform for our agents to have integrated customer profiles right at their fingertips,” Kline added.
Plus, supervisors and the rest of the service team’s leadership didn’t have reliable key performance indicators (KPIs) to track. It was often unclear where communication went wrong and what agents were doing. “We didn’t have reliable insight into hold time, wait time, and response time because we were using several different platforms and we couldn’t combine metrics,” said Becca McGuire, customer service department manager at 5i.
Solution | Hitting the Sweet Spot with a Contact-Center-as-a-Service Solution
The 5i team was already running multiple AWS services in their tech stack, so Kline’s first move was to search for an AWS-based CCaaS. That led him to Amazon Connect. “With Amazon Connect, we found a technical solution that reduces the amount of switching between programs so our service reps can focus on their core jobs and expertise,” Kline said. Compared to other CCaaS on the market, the 5i team appreciated how Amazon Connect offered a complete omnichannel experience, with the ability to build out connectors into everything from Gmail to Instagram. “Other solutions would have a few specific integrations out of the box, with more planned on their roadmaps, but they wouldn’t tell you when they would launch,” Kline added. “Amazon Connect offered us the logic for intake on two-way chats that we could build out on theoretically any channel we wanted.”
The next step was creating the frontend for Amazon Connect, and 5i’s AWS representative recommended working with Local Measure. “The level of technical expertise that Local Measure brought to our initial call was reassuring to me,” Kline said. “We didn’t look anywhere else for an implementation partner—it was a love-a-first-sight vendor selection.” Together, 5i and Local Measure devised a phased approach to set up Amazon Connect and Engage—a pre-built contact center platform for Amazon Connect powered by AWS and generative artificial intelligence (AI). Setting up the new phone system took six weeks, and integrating email took another six weeks. “After 12 weeks of working with Local Measure, we were fully operational with 95 percent of our systems—that’s a record speed for this kind of implementation,” Kline said. The remaining channels such as social media and a chatbot for the 5i website followed suit and rounded out the rest of the solution.
The Local Measure team also integrated Amazon QuickSight into the CCaaS interface, providing unprecedented insights into the performance of customer service representatives. “With the click of a button, we can look at an Amazon QuickSight dashboard to see how our service department is doing today or over the past month. That was never possible before,” McGuire said.
"After 12 weeks of working with Local Measure, we were fully operational with 95 percent of our systems—that’s a record speed for this kind of implementation.” Elric Kline, SVP of Business Intelligence & Accounting, 5i
Outcome | Swinging into Streamlined Customer Service and Cost Savings
Since implementing Engage and Amazon Connect, 5i has seen an 80 percent growth-adjusted reduction in expenses for its customer service department. The CCaaS solution allowed 5i to gain efficiencies without adding headcount—even as revenue grew 30 percent. “For the first time in our history, we didn’t grow the customer service team to service a growing company,” Kline explained. “We kept the team the same size, but with Engage, they could handle increased call and email volume.” As representatives continue using Smart Composer along with other generative AI features of Engage, 5i expects to see additional time savings. “With Smart Composer, representatives can whip up an email at the click of a button, which can help them get things done much quicker,” McGuire said.
Engage and Amazon Connect also helped 5i cut down on the service department’s error rate. Today, there are three times fewer refund requests that need multiple interactions. Service representatives can more quickly and easily find the right customer account to resolve issues without escalation. And when customers call in, they’re directed to the call queue that best matches their needs thanks to interactive voice response (IVR). As a result, 90 percent of inbound sales are routed directly to the sales team. For outbound sales, the all-in-one solution is helping 5i process more than 100 calls a day through a user-friendly auto-dialer feature.
Amazon Connect offered us the logic for intake on two-way chats that we could build out on theoretically any channel we wanted.” Elric Kline SVP of Business Intelligence & Accounting, 5i
About AWS Partner Local Measure
Local Measure is a global customer experience expert and AWS Partner that empowers businesses to deliver exceptional customer experiences. A member of the AWS Global Startup program, Local Measure has won multiple AWS Partner awards and holds several AWS competencies, including Retail ISV Competency. With a global team, Local Measure's clientele includes the world's largest hospitality, retail, financial services, government, and telecommunications businesses. Local Measure’s flagship product, Engage, is a pre-built, intelligent contact center platform that transforms customer service. Engage combines voice and digital communication channels to improve operational efficiency and deliver valuable insights. The platform uses generative AI to enhance customer service interactions and create personalized experiences that cater to the changing needs of businesses and their customers.
AWS services used
• Amazon Connect
• Amazon QuickSight
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