VANCOUVER, B.C.–If you’re satisfied that the information you have on your members includes account number, age, their address, driver’s license and card activity, two people say they have some news—the member is not satisfied.
That’s because none of that data tells the credit union anything about what is happening in the member’s life or about their present and future needs, said Greg Blausey, senior director banking industry solutions, and Amir Madjlessi, senior director banking industry, both of whom are with Salesforce.
Their remarks focused on the reasons they said every credit union needs to be operating from a cloud-based platform such as the kind their company offers.
‘It’s Hard’
“There is a variety of different forms of data we are trying to put together and it’s hard,” said Madjlessi in remarks to a session at the World Credit Union Conference. “We believe in using a platform approach to solving these challenges across the organization is a tremendous opportunity to grow the organization, to pursue financial well-being of members, and to get younger members and keep the talent you have.
“This new generation is aligned to the mission of credit unions more than any other generation, so we need to change the experience people have.”
Smooth the Onboarding
To that end, he said credit unions must smooth the onboarding process and improve the personalization of the experience for members when they are interacting with a credit union.
Knowing the member, said Madjlessi, isn’t just a “check-the-box compliance process.”
“It's also the opportunity to understand, to use this information to improve the experience for your members. It's a huge opportunity. Now, having said that, if this was easy it would have already been done on one platform.”
The ’360 View’
To get the “360” view of the consumer, Blausey said Salesforce has invested heavily in tech that provides a real-time view of where the consumer is and where that consumer is going.
As part of that he said it has developed what it calls a “discovery framework.”
“If I go into your credit union today and open a deposit account and then I want to get a loan, am I going to have to go through two different application processes, or am I going to go through one?” he asked. “We're trying to really drive towards…a very member centric experience versus a product centric experience, which is what we see a lot.”
‘Especially Frustrating’
Picking up on Blausey’s point, Madjlessi said it’s especially frustrating for a member to contact their credit union with a fraud dispute, for instance, and then to be separately served up a promotion for a product or service sale.
“You either deteriorate or build and enhance the brands, and these moments of truth matter,” Madjlessi said.
He said it’s important for every CU to understand there’s a “spectrum of touch” when interacting with members and the member’s preference for touch-points can change, depending on the situation.
The Four Stages
In interacting with members, Madjlessi said there are four stages:
- Authentication/intake
- Contextualize
- Transact
- Wrap Up
“If you have a bad experience…it can leave a sour taste in your members’ mouths,” said Blausey. “You want to be sure you're really checking that and doing everything you can to deliver the best experiences…Service is really where you can really connect with the member. What’s driving this last chapter is a high degree of personalization and engagement by using data in your organization to drive advice, to drive experience…It's a tremendous opportunity for us to do this with technology.”
View From PenFed
Joining the discussion was Shree Reddy, SVP-consumer banking technology with PenFed, which is running a new digital banking platform that is built on Salesforce.
“What is holding many organizations back is the legacy processes and technology,” said Reddy. “One way to get out of this is you have to find disruption before it finds you in order to win the digital race.”
Reddy noted some organizations can be running as many as 2,000 different applications, which he calls “technical diversity.” But all that diversity leads to friction and points of failure and staff spend their time putting out fires on a day-to-day basis rather than innovating, he said.
And then there’s the whole challenge of maintaining a healthy cybersecurity posture, he added.
“The only way to get out of this is to adopt a platform mindset,” said Reddy. “It’s not impossible without a platform, but it takes longer and it’s more expensive.”
At PenFed, Reddy said it’s referred to internally as a “future-fit” platform.
Creating ‘Digital Empathy’
All of that has created “digital empathy,” according to Reddy.
“We coined the phrase digital empathy to put the member in the middle throughout the transformation journey,” he said. “We see member experiences on the glass, above the glass and beneath the glass. On the glass is what you are seeing. Behind the glass is the portions of their journey you don’t see. Above the glass is the holistic view of all those experiences. This will force you to put the member in the middle throughout your transformation journey. That gives you the true empathy and ultimately connects back to what leaders are looking for.”
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