Meet Aimee Ten Eyck-Schaffer, Organization Procedure Consultant at OnPoint Community Credit Union.
Working closely alongside the Training Department, Aimee oversees the OnPoint Community CU employee intranet and knowledge management system, commonly referred to as the “InfoCenter.” She partners with process owners across the organization to create content and ensure that institutional knowledge is reviewed annually.
Servicing 476,000+ members and employing nearly 1,000 professionals across 58 branches in Oregon and southwest Washington state, OnPoint Community Credit Union utilizes Engageware’s Customer Self-Service and Employee Knowledge Management.
Here are 7 best practices they employ to optimize their internal knowledge base to maximize employee adoption, increase usage, and ensure consistent, easy-to-use access to policies, procedures and product information.
1. “Drill-down” Navigation: Training employees to skillfully search top-down
In an industry where employees have several hundred policies, procedures and product information to learn, finding the information they need to help a member is half the battle.
To alleviate this pain, OnPoint Community utilizes Engageware’s Procedure Builder feature to build top-down views of topical information. This allows a user to start their search from a high-level overview and “drilling down” or narrowing to more specificity from there.
For example, if the employee needs to find something credit card related, they’re going to look up ‘credit cards’ first, open up that overview, and then drill down to find more specifically what they need to know or do – for example ‘report a lost or stolen credit card.’
2. Utilize employee feedback to continuously improve content
Your employees are the reason for maintaining an internal knowledge base. If they are struggling to use it or finding holes in the content, it’s important to allow them a productive format to communicate such challenges or barriers to usage – and a process for correcting them.
To ensure ongoing optimization of your knowledge base and to improve employee adoption of the system – instill a strong employee feedback mechanism. Make it easy for employees to submit feedback on content and use that feedback to continuously improve your institution’s knowledge base.
It’s essential to address employee feedback and the issues they may raise in order to ensure strong usage, ROI, and confidence in the system’s ability to aid employees in finding and following the content they need to get their job done.
One key piece of feedback OnPoint Community received led to the creation of department-specific landing pages.
“One of our main goals is to make sure we increase the ways that employees can engage or find the information they need. Through branch visits and feedback from employees, we realized that employees enjoy the ability to search, but they also wanted the ability to navigate to find the information that they needed all on one page.”
Aimee Ten Eyck-Schaffer, Organization Procedure Consultant
OnPoint Community Credit Union
3. Incorporate visuals
To further help anchor users in the correct area break up lengthy content and navigation – utilize visuals, category blocks, and headers. The idea is to create a space that makes it easy for employees to find and recognize the information that they need.
OnPoint Community CU has noted that since incorporating imagery and iconography throughout their knowledge base, usage has increased.
Friendly Tip: Work with your Marketing team to follow branding guidelines and ensure a seamless brand experience.
4. Break down content so it’s easy to follow
A benefit of a systematically organized and routinely maintained banking knowledge base is that it empowers staff to independently search for, find, and follow the information they need to assist a customer or member in front of them.
Aimee attended a technical writing class before overhauling her credit union’s info center. She used best practices to create and structure internal employee resources in as simple a manner as possible.
“As we’re creating these resources for employees, the more we can do to make it easy to find their resources and get on with their way the better.”
Aimee Ten Eyck-Schaffer, Organization Procedure Consultant
OnPoint Community Credit Union
Watch a 3-minute demo of Engageware’s Employee Knowledge Management and learn why 350+ FIs choose Engageware
Watch Now5. Enforce regular content maintenance
A knowledge base is only as good as it is relevant and up to date. That’s why ongoing maintenance is critical to ensure the ongoing usage of the system.
Assigning ownership of content categories and delegating content maintenance is key to ensuring the upkeep. Aimee assigns each subject matter expert or department their own category, and then sets review dates within Engageware that deploy automated email reminders to those category owners.
“When content comes due for review, the category owner receives an email and then they go in and make their updates. I have the subject matter experts ‘save to draft’ so that I get a notification. This allows me to go in, review the content, and make sure it’s been formatted properly. I’m able to capture any of the changes and include them in my monthly procedure update call as well as an email that is sent out to tell everybody about what has changed.”
Aimee Ten Eyck-Schaffer, Organization Procedure Consultant
OnPoint Community Credit Union
6. Use data reports to inform decisions
Aimee makes regular use of the data and analytics reporting that is available within Employee Knowledge Management. At the end of each year, she pulls a ‘Popularity Report’ for each subject matter expert and schedules a meeting to review it with them. Together, they review trends in the data and identify the content items with the least views. This opens a discussion to determine whether that content needs to be revisited, improved, or removed.
“If it’s something that’s important that maybe employees aren’t finding, we work together to try to find a way to increase the visibility and usage of that information.”
Aimee Ten Eyck-Schaffer, Organization Procedure Consultant
OnPoint Community Credit Union
7. Use an internal call center to offset direct support volume
One of the most unique and impactful ways OnPoint Community Credit Union utilizes Employee Knowledge Management is to support its own internal call center, the Retail Support Line. This has drastically reduced the number of calls to the credit union’s back office.
The team behind the Retail Support Line is trained to assist with various topics, including the most common issues or questions that frontline staff typically ask of the back-office teams. Any employee can call the support line via a quick extension ‘HELP’ and reach one of six individuals who guide the employee to find the resources they need in the knowledge base and walk them through the steps. Aimee works with the team to learn where information may be missing or confusing, so she can make improvements to those resources.
“We’ve created our own internal call center in an effort to decrease calls to the back office. They’ve been trained to cover all the different topics…They are an intermediary line before getting to the back-office individual… If your branch is busy and your manager can’t help you in the moment, you have that retail support line to rely on to get your override.”
Aimee Ten Eyck-Schaffer, Organization Procedure Consultant
OnPoint Community Credit Union
Watch a 3-minute demo of Engageware’s Employee Knowledge Management and learn why 350+ FIs choose Engageware
Watch NowWhat is Engage with Bankers?
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