Friday, April 30, 2010

Building a Better Mouse Trap, version707.Office Hours.....

Starting Monday, May 3rd, we will be substantially expanding our office hours in all three of our offices. It’s a pretty straightforward formula:

Drive Up hours of 7:30 a.m. until 5:30 p.m. Monday through Friday
Lobby hours of 8:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. Monday through Friday

** Please note that our second drive up lanes are always open the posted drive up hours. I encourage you to use them as much as possible.

Like a lot of improvements we make to our operations, we studied this, gathered input, did a member survey, crunched the numbers and came up with, hopefully, the best solution. There’s more to this than meets the eye because expansion of our business hours can be a pretty costly proposition if not done carefully and properly. The trick is to offer the hours that members need and will utilize; anything else is a waste of money (read: Patronage Rebate).

Our goal here was to offer the option for most of our members to be able to go to the Credit Union either before or after work and not on their lunch hour. Honestly, the lunch hour has been a bugger for us at times because it has always been a popular time for members to conduct their business and, of course, our staff has to eat as well. No matter how clever you are with the schedule, it is always crunch time. Hopefully, the expanded hours will give you, our members, a better alternative than to use your lunch break to get your Credit Union business done.

Let me anticipate a question here - we considered Saturday hours. The results of our member survey indicated a desire for Saturday hours from some of our members but not in large numbers. From a scheduling standpoint, it was much more costly and difficult to offer this option than to expand hours during the week. Ultimately, we decided to invest that money towards our commitment to technology that allows you to do your business electronically 24 / 7 (more on this in my next post).

Anyway, give the new hours a try – come early, come late, whatever works for you. I hope the new hours give you better options and make things a little easier for you all the way around.

Mark