Making Conversation With Members Via a Marketing Platform
The brief one-on-one conversations help USALLIANCE learn members’ needs and preferences.
USALLIANCE Financial recognizing the growing digital banking popularity — and a coinciding decrease of branch visits — adopted Micronotes’ artificial intelligence-driven marketing automation platform to communicate with its members through concise one-on-one conversations.
The $1.75 billion Rye, N.Y. based federal credit union, which began in 1966 to serve IBM employees, now has over 118,000 members including employees of American Express, PepsiCo and Big Blue. USALLIANCE has expanded throughout the Northeast, offering a full range of financial products and digital banking services.
“The increasing popularity of digital banking—and the corresponding decline of branch visits—affects all credit unions and banks. Fewer branch visits mean fewer opportunities for our team to engage with members,” Kristi Kenworthy, assistant vice president, eCommerce, for USALLIANCE, said. “This can be an impediment to our mission of building a strong member community as well as meeting our institution’s growth objectives.”
With a conventional in-branch member engagement strategy no longer effective, USALLIANCE considered two options: 1) Keep doing what they had been doing and hope for better results; or 2) Take a completely new approach.
“As part of our strategy of putting our members first and always seeking new ways to serve their evolving needs, we had been looking for a new way to connect with members who prefer digital banking to branch visits, and who ignore banner ads. That is why we decided to deploy Micronotes in 2013,” Kenworthy recalled.
USALLIANCE chose Boston-based Micronotes to enable engagement with digital users through brief virtual conversations during, or at the end of, online or mobile banking sessions. “Micronotes is a sales enablement tool that helps financial institution engage with the customer and drive product adoption,” Christian Klacko, COO and co-founder, Micronotes, said. USALLIANCE selected two Micronotes modules: Predict, which delivers forecasts about digital banking users’ preferences; and Net Promoter Score, a method for measuring, comparing, and improving customer loyalty.
The brief one-on-ones conversations help USALLIANCE learn members’ needs and preferences. That information allows USALLIANCE to remain connected with members. Micronotes also enables USALLIANCE to deliver personalized offers to members, and immediately follows up with those shopping for specific products or services.
Read more about USALLIANCE Financial use of the Micronotes platform and the LifeCents wellness platform in the July 31 issue of CU Times.