Driving Credit Union Messaging Adoption: What Works?

Loan processing velocity, abandonment reduction and expired application rescues; collection prompts including repayment and delinquency; and contact center enhancement are areas text messaging helps credit unions spur member activity and interaction.

Those are the primary texting use cases, or beachhead, within credit unions suggested Mark Johnson, credit union and finserv sales specialist for Bozeman, Mont.-based Quiq, which provides business messaging software solutions including some 20 credit unions.

Quiq maintained that innovative, market-leading brands are currently evaluating or implementing messaging, creating a domino effect to drive messaging adoption across industries.

Johnson explained that in many cases consumer demand is driving messaging adoption and that customer satisfaction scores for messaging are the highest of all channels at 90% versus 77% for phone calls. In addition, when given the choice to message a company, 20% or more consumers immediately gravitate to it. Once they interact with a company via messaging, they will start to demand and expect the convenience of it from other brands.

Johnson noted that when speaking with credit unions, members are driving adoption and the lending aspect. “What credit unions are seeking to achieve by leveraging SMS messaging is loan velocity or trying to increase closure rates, increase the speed of processing.” Johnson added emails and voicemails slowing that down today. “It is proven that you have higher open and response rates when text messaging.”

Credit Unions look to leverage messaging technology and move loans through the system faster efficiently and more conveniently for members. Johnson noted in speaking to credit unions, Quiq found members driving text adoption by either asking for the capability or in many cases taking the initiative to text the loan officer’s personal mobile directly.

“As long as the loan officer can send a text message with an attached PDF, the member could open up that PDF, mobile sign it and send bit ack to the loan officer all within minutes.” In addition, members can utilize picture messaging for income verification (via a pay stub picture) or residence verification. “These are all disclosures or ancillary docs that typically slow the lending process down to weeks and months. With MMS and SMS credit unions now are seeing the acceleration of that loan process to weeks and days, if not hours.”

An additional area for SMS communication is collection and delinquencies. Credit Unions are utilizing Quiq for collection as payment reminders and in delinquency cases with outbound notifications.

“Credit unions using SMS notifications are experiencing delinquent cycle times reduced from months and weeks, to days and hours because of the response rate and also the convenience,” Johnson said. He added, texts help mitigate another credit union pain point, charge offs, in which the quantity without contact continues to grow “Email, voicemail is having a little to no effect on the delinquency,” Johnson said.

Quiq, within its credit union sales and marketing initiative that started just about 12 months ago, used a small sample size to measure a reduction of up to 20-25% percent in credit union delinquents.

Johnson held when credit unions bring digital communications into the contact center they look for call deflection. “That’s what we sell when we speak to call centers. Meaning that as you open additional digital channels, you can anticipate a percent of your call defected to these digital channels.” Reducing calls carries added importance to credit unions with limited staff, who handle multiple tasks.

As mobile usage continues to grow, with the steady decline in the percentage of desktop versus mobile-based web traffic, members increasingly expect interactive two-way messaging capabilities including SMS, Facebook Messenger, web chat, and in-app.