Guest author Naveen Jain is the founder and president of CULytics. He's a credit union leader experienced in actionable strategic planning, data analytics, marketing and innovation that deliver immediate ROI at multi-billion dollar institutions. He can be reached at naveen@culytics.com.
Continuous support to members and communities is in the DNA of credit unions. Now, as the economy is beginning to reopen, credit unions are reimagining their strategic plans and operations to face the New Normal of life during and post-pandemic. The actions taken by credit unions will have a significant impact on businesses, consumers, members, and the economy overall.
So, to help the credit union leader, a webinar was organized by CULytics to provide the measures that credit unions are taking towards transforming their channel strategies to better serve their members and to improve the experience to build and maintain never-ending relationships.
This article provides insights from the webinar, where leaders from progressive credit unions like Laura Wallace, VP of Customer Care at Alliant Credit Union, Maha Brauch, Director of Digital Services at Affinity Plus Credit Union and Colin Boone, VP of Digital Experience at Royal Credit Union, shared their strategies, experiences, and future planning to serve their members the best.
The followings are the highlights of the session:
Seamless Solutions: Prior to the pandemic, consumers could easily visit the branch if they were facing any issue related to the services provided to them. Due to the pandemic, things have been shifted online. Thus, it becomes a responsibility to ensure that payments, transactions, and other money-related operations can be executed with ease.
Consumer Behavior: Keep an eye on consumer behavior and notice the change in behavior to strategize your operations accordingly. Predicting consumer behavior and taking steps to ensure the best possible outcomes will be helpful to meet the needs of the consumers, communities, organizations, and the economy as a whole.
Business Continuity: Before, credit unions were operating through physical branches and providing online services as per the convenience of the consumers. Now, things are more online as physical interaction is not possible. Investing in digital technologies is the need of the hour, but when a new consumer comes to your organization, the preference would be to do things in a face-to-face manner. So, to fulfill this requirement, credit unions are adopting video conferencing, chatbots, and other similar tools for ease of communication.
Trim Your Costs: It is good to separate the “must-have” expenditures from the “nice-to-have.” Try to bring in some marketing functions and make smart investments to improve mobile and phone support services. It might increase the technology cost, but operational costs will reduce in the long term.
Adaptability: To serve the requirements of the consumers and members, credit unions have adopted video conferencing and other digital technologies. Consumers are adopting online banking services including digital lending platforms, as visiting branches is not that easy. When the economy reopens and the quarantine is over, the convenience of these technologies will not be abandoned; so investing in technology is a wise decision.
These are unprecedented times, and many are looking for the right guidance. Credit unions have an opportunity to provide that leadership and support and can be a trusted ally through this tough time.
This On-Demand Content and other similar transformation sessions are available as part of CULytics Membership.