By Joe Woods, SVP, Director Sales & Marketing
Many of our credit unions (along with other businesses across America) are seriously short staffed at the moment. There are various reasons for this. Many people are leaving current jobs for other opportunities. Others have elected to stay home and are receiving unemployment and stimulus checks equal to or close to that of their former income. And then you have some people forced to stay home temporarily due to a COVID infection or close contact with someone who has been infected.
Whatever the reason, credit unions are facing a lot of issues as a result. Being short staffed seems to make everything worse. As always, the focus should be on the member, right? Well, what happens when you have facility problems or technology issues? These situations can pull your staff down a rabbit hole and divert hours of important member-facing time to background noise that can take hours or even days to resolve.
Consider your ATMs, for instance. When a credit union has an ATM problem, they go straight to the rabbit hole. Is it a communications issue? The processor? Maybe it’s the ATM network? Your staff has to manage four or five vendors for just one ATM. There’s finger pointing by the vendors and sometimes even a reluctance to respond to an issue. It’s no wonder it takes so long to get the situation fixed.
One client of ours recently explained that their ATM issues were requiring their AVP to focus efforts on the fleet nonstop. More than 40 hours a week were spent trying to keep 13 ATMs active and functioning. And the AVP’s time didn’t include the daily balancing and settlement issues that the accounting department was managing.
No matter how many ATMs you have in operation, your staff is far too valuable to be spending time corralling vendors into fixing a broken machine. At Dolphin, our outsourcing program takes the ATM burden off your staff. Our experienced team operates thousands of ATMs across the country. By working with Dolphin you eliminate finger pointing, all the vendor management and due diligence, even the accounting nuisance. Don’t waste any more time. Talk to your league representative today about scheduling a meeting. Your members will thank you with their continued business.
Joe Woods is SVP of Marketing & Partnerships and a 20 year payments veteran
