The new letter did not match the amounts reflected on the website for payments due on April 1, creating massive confusion and frustration. If the member paid the amounts on the website, it would be wrong and trigger a late payment fee. In addition, every year, it is the responsibility of the member to update their own auto pay amounts on the website. Finding the location for where to do this on the website was impossible. It required calls to the organization, whose representatives then had to direct the member to the button, which was at the bottom of the page and not clearly visible.

This process actually took over three days to resolve, with perhaps four or five hours being devoted to figuring out the situation. Team members in the organization continued to escalate the issue to the highest levels of customer service and apologizing for the flaws in the system. Finally, at the end of the process, an email was sent out to member asking them to log into the website to see a new message. There were no messages there pertaining to this problem.

Is the back-office technology system in the mortgage department intentionally designed to extract additional fees from the member? Is the discrepancy between the new escrow letter and the inaccurate information on the website clearly understood by the leadership and management of the credit union? This problem impacted every single individual mortgage holder set up on auto pay with their organization. If left unresolved, this practice will surely lead to the erosion of member relationships, which are core to the mission of the credit union.

Dedicated CEOs need to have internal mechanisms that enable them to see, touch and interface directly with members who are having difficulties navigating their systems. A way to do this would be for the CEO to build a system that enabled them to individually see every member complaint over the course of a year, which would provide terrific data and insights into the way the organization is run.

A note to the boards of directors: If you are not seeing member satisfaction scores or interfacing with members directly, you are failing in your primary mission of ensuring continuity of the organization. If leadership is not collecting data from their membership to uncover issues like the one described above, they are missing an opportunity to understand the functionality of the organization. Additionally, if something is systemically wrong, they need to hold leadership accountable for fixing it.

The banking system is questioning the existing tax advantages provided to credit unions. It would behoove all credit unions to move with speed and take a deep dive into their processes to ensure that member satisfaction is not being destroyed. There was an article written perhaps a decade ago entitled, “Putting the Service Profit Chain to Work.”It provided a clear scale of customer/member satisfaction, with 10 being an Apostle and 0 being a Terrorist. The events described in the story above turned the member into a Terrorist.

For the sake of your members’ sanity, take the time to review your systems as if you were the member. If your systems are cumbersome, inaccurate or unfair, this will cost you member retention, referrals and successful of rebranding your institution, if that is your desired goal. Slick and impressive designs, announcements and member outreach, when not reflected in your actual services and processes, will go a long way toward destroying all the costly marketing efforts designed to positively impact your brand.