These days, if you ask credit union professionals their thoughts about long-term success, they'll tell you that delivering the best possible experience for members is key. However, not everyone agrees on the goals set for your credit union's customer experience program.
Yet, the success of this program hinges on getting buy-in from your stakeholders. So, how do you persuade these individuals to participate or at least endorse your program?
In this article, we'll concentrate on identifying your stakeholders, demonstrating to them the value of a program to improve the customer experience, and securing their help in making your program successful.
You may think it's just the Member Experience Team helping to guide and shape the member experience. The truth is everyone's work at the credit union directly impacts the member experience in some way.
Getting buy-in for your member experience program from every employee at your credit union - from the Customer Service department to IT - is essential to delivering an excellent experience for your members.
After all, these individuals will be carrying out the aims of your program. Their role in working with members - both directly and indirectly - will propel the growth and scope of your member experience program for years to come. To get buy-in from your credit union employees, consider implementing these strategies:
As credit union professionals, we're in a unique position: the members we serve are the owners of our organization. Therefore, members represent a strong faction of stakeholders that require convincing to have a successful member experience program.
But, you're not going to go door-to-door to solicit their endorsement. Instead, you'll win over this group of stakeholders in a much more nuanced way - by your actions.
If your members feel their individual experiences with your credit union are satisfactory, they'll likely assume the quality of all members' experiences are similar. This will cause them to be more than content with the overall quality of your credit union's member experience program, which in turn will improve the customer experience. Conversely, if these individuals have a negative experience with your credit union, they may think this will be the same for all credit union members.
However rare they may be, unfortunately, mistakes happen - and often, they are beyond our control. A medium to large-sized credit union may support millions of transactions or thousands of member interactions each day. Ensuring 100% of those member experiences are positive day-in-and-day-out would be an impossible task.
While your credit union can't guarantee perfection, a robust member experience program that listens, recognizes, and corrects mistakes when possible will go a long way in assuring aggrieved credit union members that a particularly negative interaction is the exception and not the norm. As your team works with members, keep these steps in mind:
In this blog, we refer to the Voice of the Member (VoM) and the Voice of the Employee (VoE). But have you heard about Voice of the Business (VoB)? VoB refers to the wants, expectations, and preferences, both spoken and unspoken, of the people who have the final say regarding decisions about your credit union's daily operation and future.
As Member Experience Teams seek to make meaningful, lasting improvements to their credit union, having buy-in from the individuals behind the VoB may be the single most crucial factor in determining the future of your member experience program.
VoB parties are concerned with the bottom line and creating a secure future for your credit union. They want to make sure that their investments to create better member experiences result in happier members and a healthy credit union, attracting new accounts and growing the balance sheet.
While positive feedback from happy members is always helpful for your Member Experience Team, it can be challenging to tie business metrics back to these qualitative endorsements. It can also be challenging to show how growing your member experience program is helping to improve the bottom line.
For VoB stakeholders, tying the problem or opportunity to known business, financial, or operational metrics is the key to focusing on improving the customer experiences. The parties behind your VoB likely have a cursory understanding of the value of having an active and engaged user experience program for your credit union. However, if not, here are some statistics from MemberXP and NCUA that you might consider sharing.
Member-focused credit unions outpaced the industry average:
The ability to show the parties behind your VoB the tangible business benefits of your member experience program - ones with proven ROI - will put these stakeholders at ease. More than that, having VoB stakeholders' support will help ensure the security, longevity, and expansion of your credit union's member experience program for years to come.
This is where MemberXP can help.
More and more organizations that are getting serious about proper benchmarking and goal setting to show tangible results of their member experience program are investing in customer service experience platforms to keep track of improvements and create new objectives.
While several of these platforms exist, MemberXP is a SaaS provider offering a suite of tools geared towards helping credit unions effectively gauge and manage member experiences.
For questions about how MemberXP can help your credit union achieve its marketing objectives or to request a demo, visit memberxp.com/live-demo/.
