Monday, March 26, 2001
Down to the details
Finalists for three administrative positions begin their campus visits
University community invited to open house
Campus Closeup
Kudos
Retirees
New faculty
You’re welcome
UGA’s Visitors Center opened in the Four Towers Building on College Station Road in 1996 under the direction of Fran Lane. Columns spoke with her recently about progress and plans for the center.

Columns: How many visitors have you had since opening?
Lane: Through December of 2000, the total number of visitor contacts was 146,000. Contacts means visitors and phone contacts.

Columns: The tour guides and the people at the front desk are students, aren’t they? How many?
Lane: Right now we’ve got 26. We’re in the process of hiring new student staff that we will train for about seven or eight weeks, and then they will come on board as our seniors are graduating. The kind of young people who apply for our jobs are great.
We’ve got a very simple mission statement: to make people feel welcome, to help them accomplish the task they’ve come to this campus to accomplish, and to provide accurate information about the University of Georgia. The way we do that is with a student staff. Our tour guides have a lot of responsibility, because in many instances they are the first or even the only contact that somebody has with the University of Georgia. They are the best ambassadors they can be.

Columns: How many hours a week do they work?
Lane: Probably five to ten. We do three tours a day Monday through Friday, two Saturday, one Sunday, but we also do special tours.
When you provide something every day, three times a day, plus special tours and staffing the desk, scheduling is a challenge. You can imagine--26 active folks who are going to school and also involved in other activities. We try to be flexible--we try to schedule around classes and activities.

Columns: And a special tour means a group that made arrangements for a tour specifically for their group--outside of the normal three tours a day?
Lane: That’s correct. We sometimes plan a special agenda for them--perhaps the Georgia Museum of Art and a North Campus tour, or North Campus and the Ramsey Center. We lead a huge number of special tours.

Columns: Are these school groups, classes, clubs?
Lane: In fact, there are several kinds, but it’s by and large high school groups. And we have a large number of middle school groups. But we’ve also had the “Silver Streakers” this week and we often have pre-school programs. There’s a lot of variety.
The two special tours we’re doing this weekend are for graduate students who are being recruited. We can be helpful with faculty and graduate student recruitment, and we’re doing more of that.

Columns: How much time do you need to set up that kind of tour?
Lane: The more the better. If you call me today and say, “I’ve got a group coming in Saturday afternoon,” we would have a difficult time providing the service we’d be proud of and you’d be proud of.
And different times of the year are different. Spring is our heaviest time. Now through the end of April, folks on campus will see a number of tour groups--we hope they’ll smile and wave when they see us coming. April is nearly full, every day, with special tours, and in March and April our regular tours will be full and we will be using extra vans and extra buses.
And the other thing I think it’s easy to forget: we really do carry our charge to the public with a student staff. During breaks, some of the students aren’t here, so those can be hard times to arrange special tours.
But with those caveats about lead time, we can be a help to people on campus. We are a phone or walk-in resource center for questions about the institution, and we also train our staff to have an understanding of a host’s function.

Columns: And to know what they’re talking about.
Lane: Absolutely. Much of our training centers on, first of all, providing accurate information during the tour, and secondly checking our sources, making sure we’ve got the right information when we answer questions or send people on to another location.
Training is interesting. We do several information sessions. They take a tour of historic Athens. And we talk about expectations and customer service.
Part of their training is some team building because our staff in most instances works in pairs. Two people at the desk--we would never leave one person here in this building alone--and two people on each tour.
One of the hardest things to learn is how to give good directions, and so we work at that. The student staff really has an opportunity to learn patience--but most of our encounters are positive.
Training is vital. We would never put somebody at that desk without that--and a substantial portion of what we do is student training and development.

Columns: What plans do you have for the future?
Lane: We had an audit of the visitors’ services program done this fall. It was a very positive audit, and some suggestions were made for expanding our services.

Columns: This was a review by an outside group?
Lane: Right--the Collegiate Information and Visitor Services Association. We had the directors of the visitors centers at the University of South Carolina and the University of Oklahoma come in. We got some great feedback.
We have an audiotape tour in the works. We are talking about some kind of internal marketing program, to help the campus community understand what we do. We’re going to have 10 new, outdoor campus maps. One of the suggestions in our audit was that our visitors center sign is not prominent enough. The review told us that we need something large, that folks cannot miss from College Station Road. We will be working on that.

Columns: But the increasing numbers must mean that people are finding out you’re here.
Lane: That’s true. If our increase in visitor contacts annually is any indication, I believe we are having a positive impact on the University of Georgia.
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