June 15th 2020
Sometimes when life is running on all cylinders it’s just too busy to analyze what you are doing and make refining adjustments. But that’s one thing COVID-19 has allowed us to do. Step back. Look over our systems of operations and make some long overdue updates.
One of the key areas has been our front desk. We have always prided ourselves on having stellar personnel at all our office positions and that is especially true at our reception/front desk. And often with two receptionists on site and the office open extended hours 7 days a week, calls were for the most part handled in person, as were appointments, notices and so on. But with reduced hours and moves in some cases to work from home due to COVID-19, we found we were relying more heavily on our answering service. And this became a problem. Now I’m not faulting the answering 
service. They have a lot on their plate and again with the available CERB benefit I’m sure its tough to find entry level employees who are competent and ready to work. But with a few calls and appointments being missed, we decided it was time to see if we could improve the system.
What we decided to do is engage a company called Broker Bay to handle our scheduling of appointments and Agent notifications. They come very highly recommended and their program is slick. What used to take our front desk a number of steps to do is suddenly reduced to a click on the computer.
And along with that change, we are moving away from Wolf Connect as front desk control, and migrating to APTO connect for our after hours answering service.
And while we are at it, we have researched our back office paperless solutions and found a provider that we’re pretty excited about. We feel it will make the transactions a lot smoother.
On and on it goes. We’ve made changes to the way we bank, making e-transfers and direct deposit a lot easier. Streamlining the way we pay 
out salaries and commissions. We’ve taken a look at our phone systems, long distance, the list goes on.
They say when life hands you a lemon, make lemonade. COVID-19 has done that. It enabled us to make a lot of significant and meaningful changes. Many thanks to Administration, Deb Quirk and the outstanding support staff we have for all their hard work in making all these changes a reality.