If your golf shop employees didn’t have to answer the phone to schedule tee times all day, would they be able to make more sales? Do you feel like you’re losing business because there is no one answering the phones at night? If you are ready to gain efficiencies and provide clients with more of a “one-stop shopping” approach, it may be time to invest in the golf software to make that happen.

   “As golf courses are having to re-think everything we are doing to be more profitable, centralization is a natural progression,” says Ted Stonehouse, general manager of Bell Bay Golf Club and chair of Cape Breton’s Fabulous Foursome, a cooperation marketing group of four golf courses on Canada’s Cape Breton Island. “Getting automated is becoming relatively cost-effective, and I would strongly recommend any club to move in this direction.”

From Small . . .

   As an individual, award-winning golf club, Bell Bay has benefited from its association
with three other golf clubs consistently ranked in Canada’s top five, and the centralization that naturally followed. The foursome came together for effective golf course marketing and cost promotions.
Then “we found a real need to make it easier for our clients and partners to be able to book tee times,” Stonehouse says. “Because traditionally what would happen is a client would call the accommodation or tour operator, and the tour operator would have to hang up the phone
and call the golf course. Then hang up the phone once they got that confirmation and call another course. But if they couldn’t confirm the client’s preferred tee time at that course, they’d call us
back to try to switch the tee time.”

   With the old system, it could take as many as four phone calls just to complete one transaction. Now, “we use online tee time booking with our hotel and tour operator partners,” Stonehouse says. “This allows the Call Center to be on the telephone with the client and book tee times directly into our tee sheets.”

   One of the Fabulous Foursome’s accommodation partners has a call center and books more than $80,000 worth of tee times with Bell Bay during a six-month season through the
online system. “Just think how many phone calls that was,” Stonehouse says. “Now they don’t have to make those phone calls, and if they take a client in January or February when we’re not in the office, you have somebody in that call center, and they can still book that tee time.”

To Large . . .

   SunBelt Golf Corporation, which manages Alabama’s 23 golf courses that make up Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail, has centralized management, accounting, human resources, merchandise purchasing and golf package reservations.

   Merchandise purchasing is a two person department, according to Pete Rouillard, SunBelt Golf ’s senior vice president. The lead buyer’s primary focus is on soft goods and gifts, accessories, etc., while the second buyer focuses on stable goods, replenishment of merchandise and moving inventory between locations to optimize sales and profit margins. “The two use reporting from each location’s Point-of-Sale system to track merchandise-related activity.”

   SunBelt Golf also has an in-house reservation center with seven reservation agents coordinating tee times, as well as accommodations. The organization works with a subscriber network for tee times that also offers a call center that is open 24 hours a day. “Right now we have a proprietary software that manages the hotel and the packaging component,” Rouillard says. “We have a separate tee time system that holds all our tee times and that information, and then we have a different POS software for the point of registration.”

   Currently, they are exploring rolling all the components up into one system. “So you could call and book a golf package, and we could keep it all in one system — from room accommodation to tee times to confirmation to actual registration and billing statement once the customer is on the site,” Rouillard says. “And then there’s the database management, which is all to itself another animal.”

   To make centralization work, all of SunBelt’s facilities are connected with high speed Internet service. “Data lines and transmission speed are mission critical,” Rouillard says. “The T1 lines allow us to provide online communications all day long. We have 10 locations with 23
golf courses, plus our reservation center, plus the after-hours service. Whenever a tee time is booked, it is instantaneously updated in the tee sheet software so that everybody sees that. The chance of double booking or having errors is virtually eliminated.”

   So how do you know if the time is right to look into centralization? “If annual savings to centralizing exceed the cost of replicating at each location, it is time to explore,” Rouillard says.

   Also look at the potential gains. For example, with tee sheet centralization, “if you had two or three golf courses within an hour’s drive, an owner could put one or two people in an office that had connectivity on the tee times and book most of the reservations there,” Rouillard says. “Then that would allow the golf shop people to focus on that day’s activities, increasing — hopefully — sales, productivity, customer service and things of that nature.

Everyone Can Benefit

The potential gains from centralization are numerous, including:

• Capitalizing on Sales. “You make one call to us, and I can sell you 23 golf courses [compared to just one],” Rouillard says. “I may have a salesperson that can sell you a product that would benefit you for multiple rounds of golf for staying with us. It is the ability to up-sell and be more efficient.”

• Reduction/Reorganization of Staff. “In some of our smaller facilities, we’ve been able to reduce the number of personnel that’s necessary in the golf shop,” Rouillard says. “At our bigger facilities, the number of people hasn’t really changed, just the efficiencies of what they do and how they spend their day.”

• Better Operational Control. “By electronically centralizing through golf software, you really have control over the inventory of what’s going on at the golf course,” Rouillard says. “If you’re running certain promotions, you can isolate those into certain time periods or times of the day, and once those are full, you re-evaluate your inventory demand. And if you’re heavily booked at one location, but not another, you may be able to move some of that activity from one golf course to another through suggestive selling.”

• Operation Efficiencies. “The biggest benefit to date has been the decrease in telephone traffic and the increase in efficiency for the hotels who at times had difficulty reaching the golf courses in the late evening to book times or during the off-season,” Stonehouse says.

• Quicker Information and Business Knowledge for Multiple Location Businesses. “With today’s e-mail technology and communications with your customer, if you see that your Thursday afternoons are always dead, you can watch that pattern, and you can respond to it quicker when you see it,” Rouillard says.

• Optimized Staff Performance. “If you have a merchandise dedicated person, are they really the right salesperson to be selling greens fees?” Rouillard says. “We’re very cognizant of what people skills and talents each of our people have, and we try to make them more efficient and more productive by putting them where their strengths lie.”