The Company
The first Little Gym was opened in 1976 by Robin Wes, an innovative educator with a genuine love for children. The Little Gym’s sequential motorskill development program was created to help children develop physically, intellectually, emotionally and socially, giving children the confidence they need for a lifetime of success.
Classes are designed for children, infancy up to 12 years, and include gymnastics, parent/child classes, sports skill development, dance and karate. The Little Gym International, Inc., headquartered in Scottsdale, Ariz., was formed in 1992 in order to franchise The Little Gym concept. Today, The Little Gym International has 275 franchises in 16 countries.
The Challenge
As a growing franchise that specializes in all aspects of child development, The Little Gym International takes pride in continually exploring ways to help its gym owners achieve success. So in 2005, The Little Gym International’s corporate office determined it was the right time to invest in the IT infrastructure that supported its individual gyms across the country. The franchised gyms did not have an effective point-of-sale tool to enroll students and track program curriculum, nor a business reporting tool to help gym owners make informed business decisions, according to Linda Mason, Vice President of IT for The Little Gym International. She explained there was a need for a comprehensive system to help individual gym owners recognize strengths and opportunities to profitably run their businesses. “Our gym owners run privately owned businesses; this is their livelihood,” said Mason.
In addition, the new system would allow the corporate office to better consolidate data from its franchises to provide improved services. The Little Gym International’s executives initiated the design of a custom Operations Management System (OMS) for deployment at all The Little Gym franchises across the U.S. While the software was under development, Mason set out to find a single outsourcer that could host the hardware for the new OMS and provide a 24-hour, highly professional help desk support to the current gyms, as well as future franchises.
“Service to our gym owners is our number one priority,” said Mason. “This clearly drove our decision-making process in searching for an outsourcer. We required a customer support center that was mature in its processes and made a profession out of support. In other words, our new outsourcing partner had to provide support as a main part of its business, not just as an adjunct to its other services.”
Mason stressed the importance of support center staff that could either solve a customer’s technical issue on the first call, or recreate the problem by using The Little Gym’s custom OMS software housed in the support center. It was critical that support center personnel had a working knowledge of the OMS, as well as the troubleshooting ability to guide a gym owner step-by-step through the resolution process.
Mason concluded, “Basically, we needed an extension of us,” referring to The Little Gym International’s internal IT staff of three, including Mason.
The OneNeck Solution
As Mason narrowed her search down to three outsourcers, OneNeck became a front runner. According to Mason, the “transparent” nature of the company’s sales process and her unlimited access to every level of the company tipped the scales in OneNeck’s favor. She was able to spend a significant amount of time with the manager of OneNeck’s 24/7 support center, learning its systems and operations. Mason also observed support center staff members who handled inquiries from nearly 50 OneNeck customers.
At the time, Mason didn’t realize that the OneNeck Support Center was well on its way to processing 43,000 Service Desk tickets by year-end 2006: 71 percent of which would be resolved in one day or less, and 37 percent would be resolved on the first call.
The “ultimate transparency,” however, came in the spring of 2006 when One- Neck invited Mason to attend its Executive Forum. An annual event hosted by OneNeck, the Executive Forum provides OneNeck customers the opportunity to share their business goals and gain insight into OneNeck’s vision. This “open forum” brings together OneNeck executives, customer executives and partners to exchange information and ideas for mutual benefit. Additionally, the event offers educational sessions on current issues and trends affecting the customers’ businesses.
