Credit unions today face growing competition and heightened member expectations for an exceptional interaction experience. As a result, their contact centers have to find ways to raise their standards of service, and many engage contact center consultants for expertise and best practices insights.
Historically, many credit union contact centers have had a difficult time garnering management attention and organizational respect. They often lack resources to achieve appropriate levels of service while facing the additional challenge of being too small to realize economies of scale. Of course, all eyes focus on the contact center when member complaints find their way to the Board or leadership team. By then, it can be hard to mount a suitable response… especially if there are “too many cooks in the kitchen.”
As credit unions continue to expand their charters, the contact center will need to attain parity with the branch offices. The new breed of member likes to conduct business by phone, web, mobile app, email, text, and/or other channels and may rarely (if ever) set foot in a branch. This sea change demands stronger communication between branch operations and the contact center as well as an integrated approach to service delivery across a broad range of media. Senior management needs a clear understanding of the support systems, processes, and resources necessary to pull this off, and must be prepared to make the requisite investments.
While adjusting to this cultural shift, credit unions are also expanding through organic growth and/or mergers. The bigger the organization, the harder it is to sustain the informal communication mechanisms that historically crossed departmental bounds, filled procedural gaps, or solved member problems. Formal business processes need to specify roles, responsibilities, and hand-offs. Manual procedures need to give way to automation. And the hodge-podge of technology that often accompanies rapid growth and organizational assimilation needs to give way to standardization.
We’ve worked with numerous credit unions looking for a “fresh set of eyes” on their operations while leveraging our contact center expertise and vendor independence. They’re keenly interested in what their peers are doing and value the insights we share based on our sizable client portfolio.
Here are a few recent projects from our credit union contact center consulting practice:
- We assessed numerous credit unions and built roadmaps to support growth and relationship building.
- We helped senior leadership gain a better understanding of the member experience and prioritize actions that would take it to a new level.
- We revamped the design and user interface for an interactive voice response system (IVR) to ensure callers are properly routed (thereby minimizing transfers) and increase self-service rates.
- We helped a client leverage existing automation to transform haphazard manual processes into streamlined workflows with appropriate hand-offs between the front line contact center reps and the back office.
- We developed metrics strategies to help contact center employees focus their attention on the right performance targets at all levels of the organization.
- We established systems and procedures to address workforce management to improve resource forecasts and identify all sources of shrinkage.
- We worked with a larger contact center to bolster its scalability and resiliency by adding a second site.
- We supported a newly merged credit union by defining the people, process, and technology requirements to form its first formal contact center.
- We helped a leading credit union define their cross-servicing initiative to grow member relationships and wallet share, including technology, processes, roles, metrics, and change management.
Contact us for more information or discuss your questions and concerns.