How the Martech Stack Lacks Impact in the Credit Union Industry

In the older days of marketing, back in the early 2000s, a few chief marketing officers invested in some rudimentary tools designed to help better manage their campaigns and audiences. They sought to organize, analyze and improve performance, and thus created the first marketing technology stacks-integrated systems that brought order, unlocked targeted campaigns and personalized messages for better results.

The changes to the industry have been particularly rapid and widely adopted by credit unions. In 2011, there were approximately 150 companies offering marketing technology. Now, there are more than 6,800 technology-based tools including direct response, mobile marketing, marketing automation, contact centers and data analytics.

Somewhere along the way, credit union marketers became stack managers: Shadow IT experts who spend more time on technology implementation than messaging, creative development or consumer research.

Credit unions today face unprecedented pressure to build and leverage stacks. Technology and software companies are desperate to control as much of the stack as possible. Internal technology teams are desperate to maintain their seat at the table. And all too often, service to the member is compromised.

This issue is most evident in the collection and distribution of current and prospective member consent and preferences – likes, dislikes, channels of choice, topics of interest and so on. However, their functionality is limited, and few of them are designed to communicate with other technologies or contribute to a holistic member record.

As a result, member consent and preferences stored in a sales CRM system never migrate to member support, marketing or third-party providers. For example, explicit permission to contact a cell phone – absolutely vital for compliance purposes – lives inside an ESP that can’t interface with the marketing automation solution.

When asked, many enterprise clients guess that their customer preference information flows through four to six separate, disconnected technologies. Through subsequent analysis, an average of 12 to 14 distinct systems are revealed – more than double their estimate, as well as clear evidence of deep compliance and customer experience challenges.

If a credit union is using Microsoft Dynamics, SAP or similar programs, it wants to track its members from a “sales” perspective – the classic customer relationship management solution. These platforms are geared to enable these marketers with the information they need to do their job – understand the member across the lifecycle and achieve insight into what services the member has used from a particular lending institution.

Preference and compliance requires maintaining history – the ability to look back over time as the member changes from one preference choice to another. With the forward-looking bias of these platforms, use of a CRM-oriented system can leave you with an incomplete picture of the member and lacking the information you need to answer a compliance inquiry.

If a credit union implements an outbound email service provider like IBM Watson Marketing, Oracle or Oracle Eloqua, the primary goal is to send communications to the member to move them further along in the member journey, based on scoring, behavior or organization objectives. While these systems extensively cover email as the primary form of communication, the member is likely engaging with the credit union across multiple channels. These systems are not incented, nor built, to provide interconnectivity between all of the touchpoints and systems each member encounters.

Members expect that when they provide a preference across one channel, the result is shared across the entire institution. Frustrations exist when the member feels like they aren’t heard or understood. Preferences shared to one system should easily propagate across all of your outbound communication platforms with a clear understanding of the source of the change. For example, members from a credit union such as Alliant Credit Union should be able to manage their communication preferences for email, phone, mail and push notifications all through the Alliant application.

If the organization is counting on the member identity access management system like SAP, Janrain or LoginRadius to solve the problem, they must look only to their primary purpose to understand why they fall short. These systems are built to provide the member with easy access across the enterprise and to more deeply understand them (from third-party sources, for example). The power in an effective preference management implementation is found in an ongoing conversation with the member as their desires change for how and what they receive in communications across all of the credit union’s channels.

A complete picture of your member requires more than just the lending preferences and member credit history you’ve collected from them to date. It also requires that they have seamless access to update their profile data and preferences as their situation changes.

What is the biggest problem credit unions are facing today with these technological systems?

The marketing technology they are utilizing lacks direct member interaction for the management, maintenance and collection of preference data, and compliance support across the enterprise. Rather than serving the member, martech advancements have caused more distractions to industry marketers focused in the lending industry. In turn, many have begun to neglect their most valuable assets, which are members.

Credit unions are always hopeful to find one system that can solve all the needs of the marketing stack, but often forget it is called a “stack” for a reason. Each component solves a specialized and specific marketing problem. It’s important to consider the original heritage of any system a business might be considering.

Eric V. Holtzclaw is Chief Strategist for PossibleNOW. He can be reached at 770-255-1020 or info@possiblenow.com.