Business In An Unplugged WorldBusiness In An Unplugged World

At some businesses, wireless handhelds are becoming critical conduits of enterprise applications. That's the case at Schlitterbahn Waterpark in New Braunfels, Texas, one of the largest and most successful water-based theme parks in the country. Leigh Murphy, director of information systems, attributes much of the success to customer satisfaction, which is key to ensuring return visits and maintaining positive word of mouth to attract new visitors.

One of Murphy's first projects after joining Schlitterbahn was to install fiber throughout the park, as well as adding new point-of-sale terminals and automated time clocks. Shortly after, she added 802.11b/g wireless-access points from Cisco Systems to revamp the customer-survey effort.

When Murphy joined Schlitterbahn in 2000, its IT infrastructure was virtually nonexistent, and its methods of tracking customer satisfaction and demographics consisted of paper-and-pencil surveys. The water park conducts two types of surveys: quantitative, which track the ZIP codes or countries of origin of visitors, and qualitative, which ask a series of questions related to the quality of the park's attractions and services.

In the past, the company sent employees out to survey guests with paper ballots, "which wasn't too great a method in a water park," she says. All of the survey data collected out in the field had to be rekeyed into computers, a particularly time-consuming task.

Today, the park uses wireless handheld devices to complete the surveys, and two employees gather 200 quantitative and 25 qualitative surveys each day, providing the park with about 30,000 surveys in the course of season, Murphy says.

The wirelessly enabled handhelds have boosted the number of surveys park employees conduct by as much as 75%. As soon as a survey is completed, an employee can wirelessly transmit the information to the park's data center, where it can be correlated and directed to the appropriate areas within the company.

Initially, PalmPilot devices were used, but employees found the displays difficult to read in the bright sunlight. The park switched to Dell's Axim handheld devices, which Murphy says have helped transform the survey effort into a much stronger tool for improving services and targeting marketing.

Using the correlated ZIP code information, Schlitterbahn has been able to more specifically target its advertising efforts and determine if certain times of the year draw more visitors from specific geographic regions, Murphy says.

The quantitative surveys help the park understand what visitors like best and least--such as long wait lines--and the quality and value of its food stations, gift shops, and restrooms. The information lets the park concentrate efforts on items most often cited by the surveys.

For example, the surveys helped the park determine that a majority of guests had spent time at the park's Web site in preparing for a visit. Murphy and her team used that information to justify hiring an in-house Web developer instead of using contracted services as it has in the past.

From taking surveys to uploading orders, wireless is becoming the communications choice for many businesses. It's time to unplug the computers.

Illustration by Claudia Newell