Many things are looking up at Navis.

The Bend-based company continues to provide hotels and resorts with locally developed, Web-based software that enables the properties to better understand customers, track marketing efforts and increase return on investment.

Navis’ leaders said the company kept profits consistent during the economic downturn and has doubled its work force in the past five years. The company attributes the growth to one of its top services, which Navis executives say can substantially improve a hotel or resort’s financial performance.

“When they’re not using the system, it becomes a cost instead of an ROI,” said Bill Schlosser, the company’s vice president of marketing, using the acronym for return on investment.

The company’s new office on Scalehouse Court in the Old Mill District, which it occupied Sept. 1, measures 12,000 square feet — a big jump from its old headquarters at 40 N.W. Greenwood Ave., which took up 7,500 square feet.

Buehner said the new digs offer room to grow, which the company is expecting to do in the near future, he said.

Meanwhile, about 125 servers continue to store data at the old Greenwood location.

The past

The company has changed in many ways since it was established under a different name, with different offerings, in Sunriver in 1987.

Milton Buehner and Greg Fry founded the company that year under the name Buehner-Fry Inc. Back then, the company was offering to install special phones in individual vacation-management rentals such as in Sunriver. The custom phones transferred the costs of long-distance calls to room occupants rather than the property owners. Navis wired calls on its phones through its own switchboard at its office.

As the years passed, though, cell phones and low-cost calling cards became widespread, discouraging people from calling long distance from rooms at vacation-management rentals.

In the first decade of the 21st century, the company began to diversify its offerings. To reflect the developments, a name change was due.

Schlosser, who joined the firm in 2005, said the company’s leaders thought out loud, “We help the client navigate information systems.” But that was too long. Thus came Navis, an abbreviation of those last three words, around 2003.

Buehner’s son Kyle now leads the company on a daily basis as CEO. Milton Buehner serves on the board of directors, along with his son.

Some aspects of the company have remained constant. It still caters to businesses in the hospitality industry, and most operations still occur over the phone.

In the past decade, Navis has added several products to its lineup, and it has gradually phased out the long-distance calling service from its offerings, Schlosser said.

In 2004, according to Schlosser, one Navis software developer said, “Hey, we’ve got long-distance traffic coming (through) our switch(board). If we can assign a long-distance number (to individual marketing campaigns), we would be able to attract some marketing (business).”

Navis management liked the idea. The company began offering to hotels and resorts 800 numbers for individual marketing campaigns, so managers could track the success of them all on one Navis website. The product was named Narrowcast.

Slowly but surely over the next few years, the company added to its website the ability to track hotel customers’ requests, reservation agents’ responses to those requests and other information that can improve the bottom line for clients.

The thinking used to be, as Kyle Buehner put it, “If we build a great technology, they (clients) will come.”

But the company saw “it wasn’t so,” he said. “What we realized was the technology wasn’t enough.”

Navis figured it would need to provide hotel and resort staffers with coaching on how to fully implement Narrowcast into daily operations, Buehner said.

“If they do these things,” he said, referring to the many actions Navis suggests reservation agents take, “then (the resorts) would see an incredible return.”

One reservation agent was doing just that and more: Michelle Marquis, who for more than a decade had been director of sales and marketing at Mt. Bachelor Village Resort.

Diane Wilcox, the resort’s general manager then and now, said Marquis was insistent on incorporating the Navis way into the resort’s business. “She just knew it inside and out,” Wilcox said.

In 2007, Marquis recalled, Buehner stopped by the resort and talked with her about how she was using Narrowcast.

“Kyle was like, ‘Wait a minute,’” she said. “‘You need to teach the rest of our clients what you’re doing.’”

She told him in detail about her Narrowcast usage, which greatly exceeded the instructions and best practices Navis was suggesting at the time. “He would go, ‘Wow, that’s really cool,’” Marquis said.

And then she was recruited over to Navis, where she’s now vice president of sales.

Over the past five years, Navis has gone from 40 employees to 75, Buehner said.

“During the recession, we (taught) our clients how to do more with less,” he said. They had to “make more sales in a time of reduced demand.” The company also added clients. And so it needed more employees.

Navis currently has about 200 clients, Schlosser said. About two-thirds are in the southeastern United States, where many resorts are located, and about 5 percent are in Oregon, Buehner said. And yet, most of the company’s call-center employees work in the Northwest, Schlosser said.

The technology

Narrowcast costs money for hotels and resorts upfront and then remains accessible for a monthly rate. Rates vary by property, and several elements factor into calculations of costs to the properties, Buehner said.

Navis buys thousands of 800, 888, 877, 866 and other numbers for clients to use with different marketing campaigns. When a call comes in, the called number appears in the software, along with the promotion tied to it, so reservation agents know how to respond.

Some demographic information on the potential customer also can pop up on the screen.

The software performs a reverse look-up. If the potential customer is calling from a home phone, the reservation agent might be able to see a name, an address, a rating of income and other statistics. A cell phone might not bring up any information for the agent to see during the conversation.

Generally, though, if the caller has used his or her phone number to call the destination in the past, data on preferences and bookings can come up.

In any case, the reservation agent can type in notes, names, numbers, addresses and other information during the call.

The call will be available for a manager to listen to later, to evaluate the agent’s performance.

Navis offers all its Narrowcast clients assistance from employees, called client advocates, who can help reservation managers get more out of the software, ultimately to help hotels and resorts raise conversion rates, which measure the percentage of calls that result in reservations.

The software also captures the duration and the result of the call, as well as the keywords the customer might have clicked on to arrive at the toll-free number used.

Information on agents themselves also enters the system, so reservation managers can track who is registering the most — and least — bookings. Navis also encourages reservation managers to tell agents to personalize conversations, convey confidence, be professional and, of course, ask to make reservations.

Such information has great power to increase revenue, Buehner said.

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” he said.

The software also keeps a record of people who end up not making reservations, so agents can call them back. Navis gives clients guidance on how to make this contact effective.

To help resorts and hotels answer calls after hours and beyond employee capacity at the destinations, Navis staffs a call center 24 hours a day, every day of the year. Workers in this call center — called RezForce — are spread out through the country and see information on the hotels being called, so they can answer site-specific questions on the fly.

Schlosser estimated nowadays Navis enlists two or three new hotels and resorts as clients per month.

He insisted that no other company offers the same set of products Navis does. Buehner said it best in an interview with The Bulletin in 2006. “We’re sort of a duck-billed platypus,” he said.

The future

The company is working to satisfy its demand, strengthen bonds with clients, enhance its current products and roll out new ones, Buehner said. But growth is around the corner. Small wonder the new office is bigger; Buehner said Navis will soon hire more workers.

And as for market expansion?

“We have a glimpse of Europe,” Buehner said.

The basics

What: Navis

Employees: 75

Where: 389 S.W. Scalehouse Court, Bend

Phone: 866-712-3439

Website: thenavisway.com