About 20 large and small credit unions are using a point-of-service feedback solution from HappyOrNot, a Finland-based company that manufactures small, portable kiosks that record member satisfaction or dissatisfaction, according to Ed Gundrum, CEO of DoublePort, an Andover, Mass.-based authorized reseller of HappyOrNot in North America.

The kiosks feature four buttons etched with a dark green face with a big smile, a light green face with a slight smile, a light red face with a semi frown and a red face with a frown.

One simple question printed on a small placard atop the kiosk asks members to “please rate our service today,” for example. Credit unions phrase service questions in other ways as well, but only one question is asked to keep it simple, which helps to increase member response.

The $120 million Duke University Federal Credit Union in Durham, N.C. installed 20 kiosks in one branch. Each teller station, as well as the desks of loan officers and member service representatives, has a kiosk. There is even one affixed next to the vacuum tube at its drive thru.

“We wanted to capture the satisfaction from the member at the time they did their transactions for every employee,” Duke President/CEO Dan Berry explained. “We felt like we would get higher volume of feedback.”

In December, of the credit union's 11,000 branch transactions, about 2,600 members provided feedback. That's a response rate of 23.6%, which is significantly higher than the response rate from an email or U.S. mail membership survey.

Berry said this response rate has been consistent month over month since the credit union installed the kiosks in April 2015. Other credit unions also reported the same response rate of more than 20%.

Member responses are recorded along with the date and time. That data is then uploaded to a HappyOrNot central server via a cell SIM card within each kiosk. The cloud-based service generates the graphic reports, which are emailed to management and employees for review early the next morning.

The data can be broken down to show employees on which days and during which hours they performed better or worse.

“I have a credit union with $146 million in assets and I really need to compete on services with everybody in the area,” Howard Meller, president/CEO of GHS Federal Credit Union in Binghamton, N.Y., said. “HappyOrNot kiosks are just a way for me to always check to make sure that we are providing the service that we need in order to grow.”

He noted the kiosk enabled the credit union to identify member complaints of long wait times at branches during the lunch hour and address them through staff scheduling changes.

“It's in-the-moment feedback, it's real simple and nobody really has to think about it,” he said.

Big credit unions such as the $2 billion Langley Federal Credit Union in Newport News, Va. also installed the HappyOrNot kiosks, which have been able to capture some in-the-moment feedback in their 18 branches.

“Although this is a very rare occurrence, we did have a member who left a branch dissatisfied and expressed his frustration at the HappyOrNot kiosk,” Langley Branch Services Analyst Amy Stoll said. “The branch manager forewarned us that this would probably show up on the kiosk. We probably would not have been made aware of this member's dissatisfaction and been able to correct it without the presence of HappyOrNot.”

In addition to giving managers quick feedback about service performance levels, Duke and the $1 billion Northeast Credit Union in Portsmouth, N.H. is using the kiosk technology to catapult service performance to greater heights.

“One of the things we wanted to do was to be more consistent in our service at the branch and we want to have incentives tied to it,” Berry said.

To establish those incentives, Duke first gathered about six months of data from the kiosks to establish a baseline for employees to work from. The average member satisfaction score was 94%.

Duke's incentives program, which launched this month, will give employees a $100 bonus for a member satisfaction score of 95%, $200 for 96% and $300 for 97%.

“What we hope it does for us is that it will reinforce that service consistency, and I can say that our employees do focus on that,” he said.

Rose O'Hare, a branch manager for Northeast, said the kiosks are a great motivator for staff members when they see they are consistently making members very happy.

“We post statistics on our back office bulletin board that are very positive, ranging from 98% to 99%,” she said. “Our staff all wants them to be 100%.”