Santa Monica, California, evokes visions of sunny days, palm trees and an active outdoor lifestyle. The scenic city’s Parks and Recreation department serves 90,000 residents across 81 centers, but managing reservations for its high-demand tennis courts was anything but a walk in the park.
A Streamlined System
Santa Monica Parks and Recreation implemented ACTIVE Net® in 2013 for services like pool reservations. In addition, prior to ACTIVE Net®, tennis center employees were still managing a “first come, first served” process for court reservations that kept phones ringing off the hook and required them to manually verify memberships and record reservations for hours on end.
Steve Yeskulsky, Community Recreations Systems Coordinator, needed to streamline this process and free up his staff to interact with the community, instead of just answering phones. With help from an ACTIVE Professional Services Consultant, the tennis staff was trained and members were prepped to enable a smooth transition to a new solution.
Reserve Anytime, Anywhere
The ACTIVE Net® Quick Reserve function now allows residents to make court reservations online in three easy clicks, automatically screening for membership–another previously time-consuming task. The system also enables online instructor requests and ball machine reservations, and sends confirmation emails. Staff are able to quickly view all reservations at-a-glance for the current day and into the future. Flexible enough to work within all existing policies and procedures, ACTIVE Net® helped the center achieve a new level of automation and ease.
A Winning Solution
Within days of kick-off, Yeskulsky reports the phones were “quiet as a library,” and customer service was back in action on the center’s sun-drenched courts. At the four-month mark, 50% of all reservations were being made online, and by six months that number had soared to 74%. To date, some 10,000 Santa Monica Parks and Recreation department tennis court reservations have been made online, and the successful service has been expanded to include barbecue and picnic facilities.
“It’s pretty phenomenal,” says Yeskulsky of the results. Member feedback on the streamlined ACTIVE Net® reservation experience is overwhelmingly positive. As for the staff, after hanging up the phones and implementing this easyto-use online system, they can now devote their full attention to helping the residents of Santa Monica participate in the activities they love.
"Our customer service is now 10 times better." Steve Yeskulsky,
Community Recreation Systems Coordinator.