Customers seem to budget no more than 10 minutes for a visit to the branch. Total time from the moment customers walk in to the time they conclude their transaction now has to be managed in a super-efficient manner for leaving a positive impression. Smart organizations look to react quicker to new and changing customer needs and are very successful as they are constantly capturing that key information helping them adapt intelligently. A Lobby Management Solution helps capture key information and will provide insight into changing customer needs in real-time.
Technology versus Human Touch
The usual conundrum facing organizations is whether a Lobby management solution will reduce human interaction and make your customer relationship less intimate? With a good Lobby Solution the answer is NO. It’s no longer about making a choice between technology vs. relationship management, it’s about utilizing technology to create a long lasting and successful relationship with the customer. A good lobby solution helps offer customers exactly what they need making every transaction more efficient.
Things to consider before you select a Lobby Solution
With our many successful implementations here is a list of observations, best practices and gotchas that you should consider while choosing the right Lobby Management Solution:
1. Technology should not replace human interaction, it should add to it. You need a flexible lobby solution that offers varied options to ensure 100% adoption at all your branches. These should include:
- Have greeters to add customers to a virtual queue
- Have customers use a touch screen interface to add themselves to the queue
- Allow a simple card swipe terminal to add a customer to the queue
- Allow a combination of these methods, if needed
Your branch location is a key factor in deciding the option that is likely to work best; e.g. a location on a college campus is likely to see more users for a touch screen as compared to one next to an area with an older populace. Keep in mind that each of these options has different degrees of confidentiality to your customer information.
2. Lobby Management solutions should make each of your tellers and branch staff more informed and better equipped to handle any customer requests. Having access to a unified queue of all waiting customers, with information on their reason for the visit, allows your staff to work effectively. It should also provide them access to check lists, relevant documents, procedures and any other details that they might need while serving customers making it a profession interaction.
3. To make any long term insightful changes in work and training patterns, you need a system that can capture critical details of each transaction. Operational times and processing times need to be captured across the branches with granular details for specialist and individual products. The most relevant pieces of information are:
- Average Customer wait times across Branches – Compare wait times across branches to understand staffing needs, staff training needs and customer request volumes.
- Average Service time across products – This could be used to understand training needs or improving workflows for the bottleneck product or services.
- Average Service time for any product across staff – Find out your stars and how they are working more efficiently, they could become your trainers for the rest of the employees.
- Peak time by branches– When do most customers come to any particular branch? This helps you balance staffing levels across branches adjusting for varying peak times.
- Idle time for staff – Your staff is not going to be handling customers the all the time, there are going to be periods of lull. We have seen creative organizations use the idle time by creating a list of odd jobs that can be performed those during these times.
Look for these reports in your search for a Lobby management system. Without these reports any new system will not be an effective management tool.
4. Gain reports on all cross-selling and up-selling efforts: Is your staff deepening the existing relationship? Do they let customers know about your additional related offerings? Your Lobby solution should clearly log initial services the customers requested and also record other services that were performed during the interaction. You should be able to measure cross selling efforts that happens during the course of the interaction and recognize the best in your team for such efforts.
5. Flexibility is important as every organization is different. Though the products you offer to your customers could be similar to your competitors, your operations, management style and philosophy is different. Choosing a solution that comes closest to your needs or better still is customizable in reports, easy of set up and delivery options can be the difference between an average and a great experience.
6. Lastly, one of the challenges faced is acceptance within the organization. Would your employees welcome this as a productivity enhancer or as big brother is watching my every move. Over our numerous implementations organizations have come back and told us that their staff loves the solution. It helps them prep for the Customer request before they step out to meet them, lets them gauge their performance and manage overall time better.
A good Lobby Management System starts right from directing customers to the right specialist in the branch, to capturing critical time information and providing robust reporting capabilities on transactions within the branch. Selecting a partner for your Lobby Management solution is a decision that will impact your customers and operations for the next several years. It is a decision that requires close attention to both the product offering and the company delivering the solution.
We hope you find these considerations helpful in selecting the right solution or your organization. Your Lobby management system will become an integral part of how you serve your customers. A well delivered project leads to a more satisfying experience for your customers and improved productivity at your branches.
Passageways has been serving customers with our solutions since 2003. Eight years later a near 100% customer retention rate establishes our credentials in delivering solutions, doing a world class implementation and the exceptional support offered by us. Passageways consults with each of our customers to ensure that their Lobby Solution is configured to reflect their needs.