Service to the Next Level
A Maui-based startup company blends high technology with traditional aloha spirit.
Don’t call TC Kokua LLC a “call center.”
Although the Maui-based startup company handles customer-related inquiries via the Internet, phone and fax—much like other call centers across the country – its business model is more intricate than that. TC Kokua takes customer service to the highest level by integrating next-generation technology with a good, old-fashioned aloha spirit. It’s that simple.
Explains President Max Tsai, “We’re a customer-contact outsource partner. One of our biggest challenges is to make sure that people realize that we aren’t an answering service.” Tsai works out of the company’s 1,200-square-foot office in the Maui Research & Technology Center with about half a dozen employees. Matt Cooley, his business partner and chief executive office of TC Kokua, is the director of operations for BackWeb Technologies, a Silicon Valley-based Internet company. TC Kokua is his side project. Both he and Tsai committed more than $125,000 of their personal capital to ramp up the company in June 2001.
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TC Kokua’s business philosophy is straightforward: deliver the best customer service using a multitude of mediums, one of which is the White Pajama CRM contact center. White Pajama, founded in California in January 2000, is an integrated network that delivers phone calls, e-mail messages and live text messages between customers and agents. The software allows agents to simultaneously access the same Web pages as customers, and build an Internet-based file of customers’ frequently asked questions.
TC Kokua’s customer-service representatives handle an average of 100 calls daily. That triple-digit figure is impressive, considering the fledgling company has four existing clients:
Micro Gaia Inc.: a biotechnology company that grows microalgae inside an enclosed bioreactor called a Bio-Dome System. Micro Gaia’s parent company is Fuji Chemicals Industry Co. Ltd.
Alalani Hawaii LLC: a real estate brokerage firm based on Maui. The company also does business as newhomenodown.com
Akina Aloha Tours: a Maui-based tour company that offers land excursions and other outdoor activities. Customers are able to book tours on line or by phone. In January, Metro magazine in Los Angeles listed the company among the nation’s 10 most innovative motor coach operators.
Maui Skyfiber: a Maui company that offers portable high-speed wireless Internet access packages that require no installation. As of this writing in late February, it was pending a name change.
“The beauty of TC Kokua’s model is that it’s directly tied to the business volume,” Tsai says. A one-time implementation fee for customers covers the initial front- and back-end support of TC Kokua’s services. After that, client fees include a monthly-service charge and per-transaction payment, which range between $1.10 and $1.40 per minute.
He breaks down TC Kokua’s business strategy into three tiers: basic customer-service operations; serious business applications; and lastly, technical support. Steps one and two are achievable. And the company, for now, stops at that. “Level three is what we’re avoiding,” he says. “Our focus right now is to build that critical mass, economies of scale. The more people we hire will be a direct indicator of that.”
TC Kokua at the time of this writing, had several discussions with a major mutual-funds company based in San Francisco. Cooley at the time could only say this: “We’re working with a well-known person in the financial-services industry, who started a number of companies over the past 20 to 30 years,” he says.
TC Kokua hopes to build its Hawaii presence and eventually expand its operations to the West Coast and Asia by the end of this year. The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks offset the company’s revenue projections and goals to hire at least a dozen customer-service representatives by the end of the year. However, Cooley and Tsai both are confident that this venture will one day, become a major customer-service center in the Islands.
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