VANCOUVER, B.C.–“Dozens” of workers at credit unions in Canada complained that they feel the same pressures as bank employees to meet high sales targets, and further suggested those sales are often to the detriment of members.
One former CU employee even said members had been turned into “marks.”
A report done as part of “Go Public,” an investigative segment by CBC-TV, found employees at Canadian CUs saying they are worried over their jobs if they don’t meet goals. The report followed a similar story done by Go Public on Canada’s five banks.
"We brag about being better than the banks, but when it comes to upselling we're exactly the same," a former longtime employee at B.C.'s Coast Capital Savings, told Go Public.
CBC said it concealed the identities of the former employees quoted here because they still work in the financial industry or hope to do so again in the future.
That same Coast Capital Savings employee said he recently quit after seeing sales targets ramp up so high "we stopped acting for our members, and only cared about the sale." The ratcheting up of sales targets began in 2009, he told Go Public, after the credit union brought in a new CEO from HSBC Bank, who then hired more people from HSBC and started to push the banking model of high sales targets. "If I didn't constantly push people into more debt, my manager would tell me, 'You're on the bus, or you're flattening the tires.' That was the attitude."
In response, CBC-TV said Coast Capital declined to make its CEO available for an interview, but issued a statement that he is hopeful the report will encourage all employees "to share their thoughts" with him directly.
Coast Capital said the use of sales goals is "an important and a standard business practice" but employees are always asked to "do what is right for the member."
Canadian Credit Union Association president and CEO Martha Durdin said credit unions are motivated to serve their members and that "having conversations about products … isn't necessarily bad. There's a difference between having targets and forcing people into things they don't need."
A former employee of Alberta's Servus Credit Union told Go Public she was recently fired because she couldn't meet sales targets. In her termination letter, Servus says it had "performance concerns."
"If I didn't try to upsell a member, my manager would ask, 'How do you know you haven't missed an opportunity?' We turned members into marks,” the former employee said.
The complete report can be found here: http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/credit-union-employees-say-sales-targets-too-high-1.4109076