Member Experience Matters

Before his team would gather for a meeting, Jerrod Keller would place a chair at the table that was different from the other chairs.

“I let people know this is the member’s chair, so anytime we meet in this room, everybody – not just the chief experience officer, not just the VP of member experience or whoever – we all need to be sitting here thinking about what is best for the member, and we also need to recognize that the member experience should be involved in our minds in every conversation that we have,” said Keller, who was recently appointed to the newly-created position of chief experience officer at the $4.7 billion SAFE Credit Union in Folsom, Calif.

Keller and leaders at TTCU, Wescom Credit Union, Park View Federal Credit Union and Rise Credit Union said enhancing the member experience is a continuous improvement program because when technology capabilities change, so do the expectations of members, who want their banking to be easier, better and faster, and for it to save them not only time but money as well.

While credit union employees who work at a branch or contact center know how to make the member experience memorable in person, credit unions are leveraging a variety of technology tools – including those from fintech vendors – to enhance the member experience online and on mobile apps.

For example, when he served as the member experience chief at the $4.2 billion TwinStar Credit Union in Lacy, Wash., Keller used Qualtrics’ technology platform, which enabled the credit union to track and assess members’ movements throughout a website or app to help take the guess work out.

“We basically shined a flashlight on some of the darkest spaces in our members’ journey that gave us all this data, which then allowed us to actually enhance those experiences without having to make assumptions on what we thought was best for the member,” he said.

Jeff Baenziger, vice president of digital strategies for the $2.6 billion TTCU in Tulsa, Okla., said optimizing these internal workflows is a never-ending cycle of staying relevant in the lives of their members.

For example, the QR code wasn’t introduced to the mainstream public until 2010 when QR code scanners and readers were installed on smartphones, according to Code Corp., which is considered to be one of the pioneers in data capture innovation. But the Salt Lake City-based organization said it wasn’t until 2011 when the QR code began gaining some traction with the general population. Now, QR codes are ubiquitous and TTCU is leveraging them to enhance the member experience in its indirect program.

The credit union has hundreds of partnerships with car dealerships from Iowa to Southern Texas.

Before TTCU used QR codes, feedback from members made the credit union’s leaders realize that after signing the loan papers, indirect members had to figure out on their own how to set up their loan payments.

Today, when consumers opt for a TTCU loan, they are given a packet that includes a QR code that takes them to the credit union app, as well as direct links to the website, where they can view short videos with step-by-step instructions on how to set up their loan payments.

This technology feature eliminates the guesswork and friction, making it easier and faster for members to do what they need to do, Baenziger noted.

After the indirect loan member sets up payments, TTCU makes contact via a phone call and email without attempting to cross-sell any new products or services.

“So we are really adamant that the initial contact is about relationship building,” he said. “We explain who we are, what we stand for, and what we offer. We’re not going to book them a new loan or browbeat them with other products right out of the gate. That’s not who we are. We’re a credit union, we’re a member-owned institution. We treat our members differently than a typical financial institution.”

A month later, however, TTCU makes a follow up call to offer a personal review for members to determine if there are other financial products that can help them.

According to Baenziger, this process has converted about 21% of indirect loan members into primary financial institution (PFI) members.

The $6 billion Wescom Credit Union in Pasadena, Calif., has made it easier, faster and more convenient for consumers to become members and secure a loan.

In 2021, the credit union became the official banking partner of the UCLA Alumni Association and introduced two new credit cards for alumni, current students and staff.

Wescom leaders realized that after marketing their new credit cards, many consumers might not apply for them after being made aware that they would first need to become a member of the credit union. As anyone can imagine, Wescom Chief Information Officer Joseph Pellissery noted, when it comes to using digital banking tools, there is not much patience for longer-than-necessary digital interactions among millennials and Gen Zers.

“What we have done as part of that process is that we have delivered a credit card application that is combined with the membership application,” Pellissery said. “So, it’s a one-stop shop. If you’re approved for the credit card, you’re automatically approved for membership. So in that one application you get a funded card that you can upload to your digital wallet and start using it immediately before the physical card arrives in the mail.”

Wescom also initially funds the share account until the new member later provides the additional funding required for that account. The credit union also has extended this one application experience to personal loans and plans to roll it out before the end of the year for auto loans.

“The whole objective is to make it fast, make it easy – anyone can complete this application process within five minutes,” he said.

Park View Federal Credit Union’s digital banking provider, Mahalo Banking, launched what the credit union said is the industry’s first and only online banking solution that fully integrates a comprehensive neurodiverse function into the platform.

An estimated 15-20% of the population has a neurodiverse condition such as dyslexia, autism, visual sensitivities, ADD, ADHA or epilepsy, among others.

“So within Mahalo Banking’s new release, they have a dyslexic font. So if you’re dyslexic, you can choose that font as it allows you to be able to read things easier,” Park View Director of Digital Operations Tanya Holland said. “It has specific color themes for folks who have colorblindness. It also has a left-hand mode within the app. So if you’re left-handed, it flips the menus so that they are easier to use. It has dark mode if you suffer from light sensitivities. So it has been really neat to see those integrated options so that our members can truly customize it to exactly what works best for them and their personal use.”

Holland said she also has found that elderly members enjoy the large fonts and black and white color themes, which seem to simplify their online/mobile experience.

Other ways the $360 million, Harrisonburg, Va.-based Park View is enhancing the member experience is by providing a free person-to-person (P2P) solution, a member-to-member transfer option, as well as SavvyMoney, which allows members to keep track of their credit report and credit score.

“When you go into SavvyMoney, you can view your credit report and see other loan offers,” she said. “So we are able now to show that if a member brings a vehicle loan with a bank to Park View, we can save the member money over the life of the loan.”

The $1 billion Raiz (pronounced Rise) Federal Credit Union in El Paso, Texas launched a new digital banking platform in July.

“We’ve always been known for delivering red carpet service as our Net Promoter Scores are very, very high,” Raiz President/CEO Max Villaronga said. “But what we found is that our Net Promoter Scores in the digital channels were not very good. We embarked on our mission to ­improve the member experience through our digital channels during the pandemic. At that time, it became a real critical vulnerability for us because our members needed to interact with us at a distance.”

The new technology tools enable members to have more control over how they manage, move and borrow money. For example, the new Raiz digital platform offers integrated financial wellness features that allow members to track progress on various savings goals, monitor spending, view credit scores, integrate external accounts, prevent fraud with card management and receive prompt answers with an on-the-go AI financial assistant named Archie.

The new platform also allows credit union employees to co-browse online with members so that employees can see what the members are seeing on their accounts.

Villaronga noted AI Archie and co-browsing are big hits with members.

“One of the things we dealt with for a long time was when members would leave the El Paso community, they would leave us because they didn’t feel comfortable with our remote services,” he said. “With these technology tools we have now, there’s really zero reason they would ever want to leave us, because our tools are so user friendly.”