Sfcu-Virtual Receptionist Program

As a student majoring in MIS, I agree that the advancements in technology enable companies to increase efficiency and quality at a lower cost. SFCU where I work has always had this vision. Early in 2005, Schools had made a technology decision to create a product named “Virtual Receptionist”. The Virtual Receptionist program is a solution to provide enhanced customer relations and automated appointment scheduling with a Member Service at various Schools locations, and was launched in July 2005. I strongly supported this decision. This is mainly because as a customer, I hate to wait in long lines when I go to a financial institution, especially when there are people in front of me who are socializing with the receptionist while members like me may be going there during lunch just for a quick transaction. In addition, I feel like we are in a generation where we expect to see and utilize new technology. A virtual receptionist will bring efficiency by reducing the time spent interacting with the members to schedule appointments. It will increase the amount of time available to provide service to members, and hence, raise our quality of member service and improve customer relations. And, as for the Credit Union, I know after we have done the break-even analysis and cost analysis, the virtual receptionist is a cost-effective product because it has reduced staff as we streamline our company process.

When the product was being developed, our Information Services department had frequent meetings. We were all trying to contribute our ideas to help to make decisions such as how the product we design should look, what kinds of functions the virtual receptionist machine should perform, how we could make the members who use the virtual receptionist feel like this product is no difference than interacting with a human receptionist, and which department under Information Services would be responsible for the development, test, training, user support, deployment, and operations parts of this project. I was assigned to help design the Virtual Receptionist flow overview diagram for the Application Development department using flowcharts. I started doing a process flow analysis by brainstorming all the inputs to outputs that would be require in the Virtual Receptionist program. I then re-arranged and put the processes in sequential