Roundabout

Below is a summary from Vantage Credit Union employee Matt Fagala, outlining the goals Vantage had and how FORUM Solutions worked with their team to integrate processes and develop custom “CRM-like” software (Roundabout).

Goals: Our goals were to consolidate all our member and employee information into one easy-to-navigate portal, reduce the number of applications that staff had to navigate and improve member service by providing staff with more information. First we had to decide what types of information would provide the best benefit to our staff. To help us decide we formed a subject matter expert group (SME for short). The people selected to be SME’s were typically not managers, but experienced staff that had the best knowledge about their own department’s common processes and daily tasks. The SME group was tasked with giving the development team their input on what kinds of information would best benefit their department. Once the development team had compiled the lists it became apparent there were many common concerns affecting multiple areas. The common list we compiled was used to build a couple prototypes of the Roundabout. We put the prototypes in front of the SME group and eventually settled on a design.

Design: The design required the following:

• The user interface design had to be a Rich Internet Application (RIA) that could also be quickly navigated via keyboard.
• Staff needed the ability to get to any piece of information the credit union has on a member quickly, thus enabling staff to serve our members at the time an interaction occurs. (Mortgage, Investments, Loans, Shares, Marketing Campaigns, Collections, Scanned Images, etc…) We called this the 360 degree view of the member.
• The ability to track all member interactions for future trend analysis.
• The ability to quickly generate multiple referrals or service requests from one common interface.
• The ability to build work flow for service requests and referrals. All the above sounds fine on paper, but we had one big roadblock; integration. How do we take all the data across multiple data sources and serve it up into the portal? This is where FORUM Solutions was able to help. FORUM Solutions’ experience with TAPS, Intersystems’ Cache database and our core platform (USERS Datasafe) was key in building a solution. The framework FORUM Solutions developed can be extended to our public website or any other application we decide to integrate with later.

Rolling Out: Using the final beta of the Roundabout we performed some timed usability tests. We took some common calls the phone center takes and some common questions a Financial Services Representative may get from members. Then we had a group of SME’s perform some of those common tasks using their original applications and a group of inexperienced users perform the same tasks using the Roundabout. The results showed that most of those tasks were performed in less keystrokes and clicks using the Roundabout vs. the original applications. Also, we were able to perform additional time saving tasks that were not possible in the original applications. Satisfied with our results, we finished up development and scheduled training.

Below is a small list of the most notable improvements we have seen:

• 62% improvement in time it takes to get member profile open to employees.
• 80% improvement in time to locate fees charged to members (Important for keeping consistent stance with members on refunds).
• 90% improvement in time to filter and display cleared checks/transactions (including who the transaction was with).
• Ability to see all member relationships in member profile and drill down into them (no more hopping from one system to another for details)
• Commands issued in Roundabout during the first week it was live: 7010
• Member Interactions tracked in the first week: 3155
• Member Referrals generated in the first week: 183

Based on the numbers above, we know we are saving the staff time, getting information to them more quickly and staff usage is high. Finally we asked all staff to give their opinion after completing training. Below is a list of common responses:

• “Reduction in calls to back office departments from front office staff.”
• “Much easier to navigate.”
• “New employees are seeing a shorter learning curve using the Roundabout when compared to older applications.”
• Filtering capabilities (not previously available) are saving time in multiple departments.
• “Roundabout is the best program the Credit Union has rolled out since I started as an employee.” (5 year employee)

What’s Next: We are continuing to develop and add features based on staff requests. There will be a steady stream of minor changes going in throughout 2008 and 2009 with major releases being deployed two or three times a year. We will be gathering data on usage and begin reporting on the effects the Roundabout has had on the phone center, front line staff and member satisfaction rating. It’s too early to tell, but so far the numbers are promising.