Good Lobby Management Is Crucial to Member Satisfaction

January 14, 2005

How do branch visitors feel about waiting in your lobby? Does the experience encourage them to return to buy more products and services, or does the lobby “wait” leave the impression that your credit union is less efficient or professional than they deserve?

Case Study: SAFE Credit Union When SAFE, a community credit union in North Highlands, California, decided to enhance their competitiveness by re-engineering key processes, CEO Henry Wirz and SAFE’s board chose the deposit account opening as the first target for improvement. “The branch lobby was the natural starting place for improvement,” says Wirz. “We wanted to make it among the best managed lobbies in the industry.”

When SAFE surveyed the market for existing solutions, it found several mature, industrial-strength lobby solutions available, but they seemed better suited to very high-volume, impersonal situations like motor vehicle offices rather than credit union lobbies. The low-end, share-ware applications had extremely low acquisition costs, but met few of the credit union’s other needs.

Since none of the available solutions were a good fit, SAFE made the decision to develop a new lobby management application and make it available to all credit unions. As a result, a solution called Better Lobby is now available through a SAFE-sponsored CUSO.

Better Lobby allows any staff member to place a visitor into the lobby queue from any computer in the branch. The queue is visible to all branch service staff as well as credit union management, whether on-site or remote. Only the visitor’s name and visit purpose is needed to start the process. MSRs select the member they will serve from the queue and, when the service is complete, close off the service event. Basic follow-up reminders are provided if a call back is needed. All branch MSRs are notified of new additions to the queue and of any visitor that waits longer than the established standard.

The Benefits of Better Reporting

In addition to bringing order and visibility to the branch lobby, Better Lobby provides remarkable reporting on service events that were previously very hard to measure. Better Lobby’s “Service History” report illustrates this point well. The report shows the number of members served by each SAFE MSR at one of the credit union’s 10 branches during the period of July 8-9. The real-time report was created part way through July ninth, so some visitors are shown as either still “waiting” or “being helped.” Employees are identified by their initials next to each bar in the graph. At the bottom is a list of members who were served during the reporting period, together with their “wait time,” “help time,” “status,” and the “MSR” who served them. More information is available by scrolling through the report. Other reporting needs are met by three additional real-time reports that function in a similar way.

Better Lobby service history report. Member information is fictitious.

Choosing a Lobby Management Solution

When it comes to choosing a lobby management solution, the size of the branch is a determining factor. Very small branches do not need lobby management technology to provide good service. Their size alone means that visitor volume is typically low. As a result, members receive a level of personalized service that contributes to a perception of high-service quality.

But branches with six or more total staff are likely candidates for lobby management improvements. The ideal lobby management solution should meet the following criteria:

-Requires very little effort to learn and use -Encourages best work practice and enable great customer service -Provides immediate benefits to CU staff at all levels of the organization -Provides real time reporting -Helps establish and monitor employee performance standards -Actively discourages bad practices (like serving customers out of order due to sale incentives or because the service request is “easier” to handle) -Is affordable and easy to setup and administer -Integrates with the host and other systems – and uses current technology. -Produces an attractive return on investment (ROI) paid back in months, not years.

Assessing Your Credit Union’s Lobby Experience

To determine whether or not your credit union needs to implement a lobby management solution, begin with an honest, thorough analysis of your current lobby experience.

Why do members (or potential members) visit the branch? How many new accounts were opened yesterday in your branches? What staff representatives opened them? How long did it take? Of course, some of this information is available from existing systems, but it is a rare credit union that can apply time measurements to “customers served” and “products sold.”

How much time are my platform staff spending with members? What portion of their day do they actually spend providing face-to-face service? Which MSR handles the most traffic? When do the peaks and valleys occur?

How long do members really wait in your branch lobbies? You can better manage the customer experience when you know exactly how much time members spend in the lobby. Don’t be satisfied with averages. The average may seem reasonable to you, but members’ needs vary depending on their circumstances. The same member, who happily waits 20 minutes on their day off work, may be very dissatisfied with an unexpected wait of 20 minutes during their lunch break.

Of course, the average time may not represent the actual wait times that are experienced by members at different times of the day and in different branch locations. Your average wait time for the month may be four minutes, but what is the longest wait time – and what percentage of your members exceed a wait of 10, 15 or 30 minutes? Achieving short wait times requires either active lobby visitor management or over-staffing; and we all know that over-staffing is not a sustainable practice.

If long waits are unavoidable, make sure you learn from the situation and take action to improve. Long waits contribute to a bad perception of your CU’s professionalism, reliability, and competency in the mind of the member. This perception will influence where they buy their next financial product or service.

The conclusion: Branch lobby management is an untapped opportunity to improve service quality, employee performance, and sales.

Rick Poulton is President of Better Branches, LLC. Better Branches focuses on providing affordable solutions that manage specific member experience “hot spots” such as platform lobby traffic and service requests. For more information, visit www.BetterBranches.com or contact Rick Poulton at 415-614-0016.

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