Talking Stick Golf Club is a premier 36-hole Scottsdale golf destination owned and operated by the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community. Designed by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, the club brings together championship golf, sweeping desert and mountain views, and a guest experience rooted in stewardship, hospitality and respect for the land.
That experience extends far beyond the fairways. With golf, dining, instruction, practice facilities, tournaments, weddings, banquets and a steady stream of visiting golfers, Talking Stick Golf Club manages a wide range of guest needs every day.
With more than 45,000 calls coming in annually, the club needed a better way to manage caller questions, route requests and protect the guest experience from the first phone call.
Working with Salt River Connect, which provides businesses in the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community with communications and technology services, Talking Stick Golf Club implemented MyCloud AI Receptionist to improve how inbound calls are answered, routed and resolved.
The Challenge: The Booking Call Center Couldn’t Handle Every Guest Need
Talking Stick has long used a third-party answering service, but that service was designed for one primary purpose: booking tee times. That created a gap.
Only about 15,000 of Talking Stick’s 45,000 annual calls resulted in tee-time bookings. The rest came from people asking about hours, pricing, dress code, directions, restaurant availability, golf instruction, practice facilities, weddings, banquets and other guest needs.
The answering service was being stretched beyond its core role. Because the team was not onsite and did not have full visibility into the golf club’s day-to-day operations, callers were sometimes routed incorrectly, sent back to the course unnecessarily or given information that was incomplete or inaccurate.
Roy Smith, CEO of Talking Stick Golf Club, said the frustration started with the call center taking in “thousands of calls a month,” only for many of those calls to end up back at the golf course.
The real issue, though, was the guest experience. “It was creating a very bad experience for our guests,” Smith said. “They had to go through all of these steps just to get to somebody who actually works here.”
For a hospitality-driven business, that was the problem Talking Stick Golf Club needed to solve. The goal was not simply to reduce call volume, but to ensure calls were answered quickly and accurately from the start.
The Solution: MyCloud AI Receptionist Became the First Voice Callers Hear
On the recommendation of the technology experts at Salt River Connect, Talking Stick implemented MyCloud AI Receptionist as the first voice callers hear.
Instead of sending every call directly to the answering service, MyCloud AI Receptionist now acts as a smart front door. It answers the phone, asks how it can help and determines what the caller needs.
If someone asks about restaurant hours, it can answer. If someone asks about dress code, it can answer. If someone wants to make a tee time, it connects the call to a concierge at the booking center.
That was key: Talking Stick did not need to replace its current reservation process. It needed to make the process work better. Smith explained that the call center was “there for one reason, and that’s to book tee times.”
MyCloud AI Receptionist gives the club a way to keep the call center focused on that purpose while giving other callers a faster, cleaner path to the information they need.
The setup process was practical and collaborative. The Talking Stick Golf Club team completed an onboarding survey with details about the business, connected MyCloud AI Receptionist to approved information from the club’s website and tested the experience with real-world caller scenarios, including long pauses, muffled voices and common questions.
Once testing was complete, the team was able to fine-tune the experience quickly and go live.
MyCloud AI Receptionist also created a feedback loop for continuous improvement. When a caller cannot get the right answer, the system can generate an email with the caller’s information and the issue so the Talking Stick team can follow up. Those interactions help the team identify where website content or AI training can be improved.
The Results: A Faster Path to the Right Answer or Destination
After using MyCloud AI Receptionist for a few weeks, the change is already reshaping the caller experience.
The biggest impact is that callers now have a more direct path to the right answer or destination. MyCloud AI Receptionist now helps answer general questions upfront, while tee-time requests continue to flow to the booking center.
- For callers, that means fewer unnecessary transfers, less confusion and faster access to basic information like hours, policies, directions, dress code and restaurant availability.
- For the call center, it means fewer calls that fall outside its core purpose.
- For the Talking Stick Golf Club team, it means fewer avoidable interruptions and a more reliable way to capture issues that still need personal follow-up.
MyCloud AI Receptionist is “a very useful tool to help distribute phone calls to the right person,” Smith said.
His advice to other businesses dealing with a similar challenge: “You’d be silly not to move to something like this. It’s a better customer experience and a better way to handle a large volume of phone calls.”
Talking Stick Golf Club’s experience shows the practical value of AI in a service environment. It’s not about replacing hospitality with automation; It’s about protecting the guest experience from the very first interaction, making sure every caller is understood, guided to the right place and treated with the same care they expect when they arrive at Talking Stick Golf Club.