Montana Call Center Overview

In 1996, Travel Montana (the State's Tourism Promotions Division) selected MARS STOUT to manage the new Montana Call Center program, providing telephone-based travel counseling to the hundreds of thousands of tourism inquiries made annually to Travel Montana. The Montana Call Center is staffed by a team of highly trained travel counselors, promoting Montana as a vacation destination to interested visitors via telephone, email, fax, mail, the Internet, and web chat.

Since 1996, the Travel Montana program, administered by MARS STOUT, has handled more than 3 million inquiries. We have been highly praised by potential visitors and the Travel Montana staff for our professional performance and timely customer assistance.

Through our evolution in the tourism services industry in Montana, MARS STOUT has become a one-solution customer service center that works with organizations and their advertising agency to provide the following customized services:

Inbound telephone travel counseling program
Data entry of telephone and non-telephone inquiries into a custom database, tracking advertising sources, inquiry methods, geography, travel preferences and related travel characteristics.
Fulfillment of customer vacation planning needs with travel guides, maps, electronic materials, individual email responses, and electronic fax capabilities.
Custom monthly reporting to organizations covering areas such as inquiry activity, interest patterns, and preferences.
Capability to export organizational database information to members or to an advertising agency, for relational marketing efforts.
Online web-based customer assistance in real time, as well as web-hosting, web-site creation, and web-site updates for tourism clients.
Facilitate direct email advertising to thousands of email addresses captured in customized client databases, designed at MARS STOUT.
Outbound surveying and updates of member listings and contact information.
Electronic management of organization's reader service inquiries from magazines and Internet sites selected by the advertising agency.
Act as liaison with reader service providers to insure reliable and timely lead management and information fulfillment.

The primary focus of the MARS STOUT Tourism Call Center program is to provide professional travel counseling to consumers by telephone, email and reader service. An equally important objective is to deliver information requested in the most timely manner possible, while maintaining a cost effective fulfillment budget for our clients.

Once developed, enhanced services such as electronic fulfillment and Internet support services can be added, allowing MARS STOUT to provide the full range of services for each program we manage.

MARS STOUT provides ongoing technical information as requested by our tourism clients. We provide assistance over the telephone and in person regarding lead sharing, call center scripting, vacation planning publication fulfillment, mailing, as well as other relevant call center and telemarketing processes. We also attend, in person, as many client-related meetings as our schedule allows.

MARS STOUT currently provides our tourism inquiry call center services on both a per-inquiry basis and a flat-rate scale for our clients.

MARS STOUT is not engaged in reservation services for any of our tourism or non-tourism clientele. We provide call center and fulfillment services for tourism organizations and provide business tax-credit retrieval services for the balance of our non-tourism clientele.

MARS STOUT provides extensive monthly reporting to our tourism clients. Our core monthly reports include: the Travel Guide Distribution Report, Inquiry Geography Report, and Interest/Location Preferences.

MARS STOUT manages tourism requests in all existing formats including telephone, email, Internet guestbooks, magazine reader service, electronic fax and sales leads. We currently handle real-time tourism counseling transactions for a number of our tourism clients over the Internet.

One of our principle objectives in the tourism services industry is to maintain a 98% call completion rate, as well as keeping call response times below 30 seconds. We presently maintain call completion rates of 99%, virtually all clients, while maintaining call-handling speeds of less than 12 seconds. All travel counseling staff members are equipped with digital phone terminals, providing them with real-time statistics on calls holding and holding times. Our Definity PBX switch allows our Tourism Services Manager to monitor and ensure that both our completion and hold levels are achieved and preserved. A state-of-the-art travel-counseling center, with each telephone agent having direct access to T-1-fed Internet resources, allows our travel counselors to use various tourism resources on-line, in addition to the various hard-copy travel guides and reference materials provided by our clients.

MARS STOUT currently provides tourism call center services Monday - Friday, from 7am until 6pm MST. Upon request we provide weekend and extended hours during peak advertising and call seasons. Requests for weekend coverage are reviewed on a case-by-case basis, to determine if proposed inquiry volumes would justify live travel counselor staffing.