ST PETERSBURG, Fla. — PSCU Financial Services is using a software program to eliminate a great deal of manual data processing work.
It's an efficiency move that's removed 250 to 300 hours of manual jobs each month, allowing staff to focus more attention on the customer. "It lets us provide better customer service," explained Michael Aldrich, supervisor of the PSCU response center. "This gives us more people on the phones, less waiting time for customers, and fewer abandoned calls."
The PSCU data center handles more than 12,000 calls a month, from internal employees, CU members, and members of credit unions, Aldrich pointed out.
One big job PSCU is no longer handling manually, according to Aldrich, is checking its member credit unions' websites to make sure they are up and operating properly. "For those credit unions that ask for this service, we will check their websites every 30 minutes, all day long," Aldrich said. "Automating this service saves us time and credit unions money."
The Los Angeles-based Network Automation's AutoMate software is responsible for the improvement. "It's standalone software that sits on a computer and mimics anything a person can do," Aldrich said. "We have 50 some jobs that we do on a daily basis that AutoMate is handling. For any function, it can monitor for errors, send e-mails, anything a person could do."
For example, sending NSF reports to its member credit unions. "Those come in to us via one giant Excel sheet," Aldrich said. "I used to have to break the data up by client ID and make individual Excel sheets for each. We are talking about hundreds of credit unions and five to six hours of work. AutoMate completes the entire process in less than an hour, and it cuts down on errors, especially with these longer jobs."
Bob Perini, PSCU data center services manager, added that AutoMate can make reports, check support request tickets, and look for specific things on a website. "When it checks a website to see if it is operating properly, it logs in with a test account and looks for certain images and words on the screen. These things have to be in the right areas for AutoMate to know the page has loaded properly. If they are not, the program sends out error messages, e-mails, whatever it needs to do."
Perini said that individual credit unions can benefit from AutoMate since it's "very robust. It can be used for any kind of office situation. It's easy to figure out and use."
