How PFSweb handled the overwhelming demand for Olympic berets

PFSweb Inc. was expecting to handle 100 calls and 65 orders a day for Olympic-insignia apparel when it signed on to operate a customer call center for Roots Canada Ltd. before the winter Olympics began. But no one foresaw the demand that consumers would create for the now-famous U.S. Olympic team berets. Within days of the opening of the Olympics, PFSweb’s call center was swamped with as many as 90,000 calls a day, Mark Layton, CEO of PFSweb, tells Internet Retailer.

As a result, Plano, TX-based PFSweb found itself doing more than just answering phones and taking orders. One of the first things it did was to move customers from the telephone. It made web servers available to Roots, set them up to take orders and payments, which Roots’ Canadian web site was not able to do, then re-directed U.S. traffic from the Roots Canadian server to the PFSweb servers. The site was up within 48 hours and soon was accounting for more than half of the orders. PFSweb also installed a turbo-fax system that ended up receiving up to 20,000 faxes a day.

Since demand quickly soaked up all available product, Roots and PFSweb told customers the items were back-ordered, then gave them an estimate of when they could expect delivery. "Communication was key," Layton says. "We knew the demand and we knew the manufacturing cycle so we were able to tell customers that they could expect their orders by a certain date." A measure of how successful that communication was: Fewer than 3% of orders were canceled.

"Demand far exceeded original projections within a couple of days," Layton says. Expecting to sell 10,000 berets at most, Roots ended up selling as many as 400,000.