Culture Governs Your Member Experience

Smart leaders know that in today’s enormously competitive environment, it takes more than satisfactory customer service to thrive. Although good service is a must, it’s the many different ways that your credit union engages a member, both person-to-person and digitally that makes the difference. With that in mind, the guiding light for the credit union’s vision is about creating a high-quality member experience. The member-experience vision that defines your brand should create a relationship and an emotional connection with the member. The goal is to build loyalty, and to make a member want to stay, conduct additional business and advocate for others to join. Your credit union’s interactions with members should delight them and anticipate their needs. The total member-experience involves your people and your technology. Routine tasks should be frictionless and human interactions should leave people feeling not just well-served, but special. Employees should strive and the systems should be designed to make members feel the credit union is going above and beyond the call of duty.

Although organizations have known for a time that they must compete on “customer experience,” studies and surveys tell how a customer-centric mindset is not fully at work at most companies. Most employees do not have a grasp of the customer-centric vision that management perceives, and often people in management themselves are not clear about it. Without a sound awareness of the organization’s customer-centric vision, it cannot produce the results that will drive loyalty and create apostles to spread the good word about the credit union.

Getting the member experience right is critically important. Studies by IBM and others describe how companies that successfully execute their customer experience strategy gain higher revenue growth and profitability than their peers. A customer who is thrilled with their experience is less price sensitive. They tell others about their experience, thereby becoming an advocate for the brand. Meanwhile, data shows that dissatisfied customers generally don’t complain to the company, they just leave. Worse yet, on average, unhappy customers tell many more people about a bad experience than delighted customers tell about a good one.

Senior management must lead the organization in generating the credit union’s member-experience vision, communicating it and assuring that the organization lives it. Although this takes attention and active management by senior leaders, it is not a top down exercise. It involves employees at all levels and across all disciplines, not just member-facing staff. The board, C-Suite, IT, operations, and even your service providers have a role in defining and refining the member-experience vision. The organization as a whole participates in data collection and analysis, sharing ideas on how to improve the current member experience and clarify what the ideal situation should be. Beyond the data, stories are essential. Leaders and staff must hear and collect member stories and anecdotes about the interactions that delighted them, engendered their trust, or caused them to praise the organization to others. Stories illustrate the vision in ways that numbers cannot.

Creating and communicating the member-experience vision, then, is not a directive emailed from senior leadership. It is an interactive approach that employs both data and stories to clarify and describe extraordinary member experiences. Employees do best when they understand what behaviors are needed based on evidence that they helped to collect, values they helped to define, and strategies they helped to develop. It all needs to be clear what the vision means in practice, and how it applies in day-to-day work.

Silos will fall as your employees collaborate across disciplines and empathize with the member on their ideal experience. Empathy is key to putting the member experience at the center of decision-making, process improvement and strategy development. Engineers and technical service providers are as important to member-centric action as those who are in direct human contact. Given that digital interfaces are critical to the financial services industry, the technical staff really are on the front lines.

Notably, digital tools can also be deployed to regularly measure your culture’s status and shifts toward a member-centric mindset, which permits effectively managing the culture with real-time feedback. A culture that truly elevates the value of the member experience is foundational to making your credit union’s vision a reality. Processes, technology and incentives, however, do not deliver results by themselves. It takes a mindset whereby all employees empathize with the member and act to improve their experience at every turn.

Stuart R. Levine is Chairman and CEO for Stuart Levine & Associates and EduLeader LLC in Miami Beach, Fla.