Credit unions continue to win over consumers by positioning themselves as community-oriented institutions that provide a wide range of financial services. This success stems from credit unions’ early recognition of today’s on-demand consumers’ heightened expectations and their insistence on a better customer engagement paradigm.
Through personalized services and a member-owned financial model, credit unions create a level of trust that consumers crave. Results from Engageware’s 2017 State of Credit Unions survey support this differentiator: credit union members overwhelmingly value personalized service, and prefer live interactions such as in-branch visits. And more than one-half of survey respondents said they had no interest in doing business with an online-only branch.
A perfect example of enhanced customer engagement is Amplify Credit Union in Austin, Texas. Amplify is a true co-operative bank – member-owned and democratically run – and yet offering the same products and services as any bank.
Amplify’s primary challenge is competing with the big players on services – while having far less budget. Thus, Amplify scrutinizes the strategic partners it picks and how it spends its money to ensure a reliable ROI. The goal: to customize every banking experience for each of its members without blowing up its budget.
Noting a marked shift in how people were engaging with its website and other content, and in the variety of channels and devices they’re choosing to use, Amplify decided to follow that shift. It committed to finding solutions that let them interact with their members via any channel.
As a result, Amplify is now focused on creating and building customer journeys, particularly by customizing the experience for the member. The credit union selected Engageware to facilitate this transition, and decided to “amplify”, as it were, its Salesforce CRM by integrating Engageware into the customer relationship platform to make it easy for bank representatives to automatically track meeting history for each account.
Using Engageware, Amplify members can now pick what times they want to schedule in-person meetings, while credit union staff can identify exactly the right person to service the member’s individual needs. This helps with operational efficiency on the credit union side, while putting the power back into the customer’s hands and creating a more personalized experience from beginning to the end of the interaction.
The results speak for themselves: instead of a lot of phone tag back and forth between members and credit union staff, Amplify moves business forward, increases its conversion rate and delivers high levels of customer satisfaction. Tools like Engageware help Amplify become a lot more efficient and achieve such aggressive goals.