Building loyalty with your members starts from the day they join. Actually, it starts with the marketing message that attracted the new member in the first place. But when they join, that’s when the rubber hits the road to build your credit union’s relationship with that member. Study after study has shown that the first few days and weeks after a member joins your credit union are crucial in laying a solid foundation of service to retain that individual for a long, long time.
Laying this solid foundation in the early days of a new membership is called “onboarding.” Onboarding is the process of welcoming a new member with special offers for services, constant communications for any support issues, and any follow up inquiries. These efforts all occur within the first 90 days or so of the membership to ensure the new member feels at home. It’s also the prime time to upsell them any products or services.
Realizing the benefits of this early bonding time with new members, Sb1 Federal Credit Union ($539 million; 32,643 members; Philadelphia, PA) was looking to enhance its onboarding process for increased growth. Along with setting specific strategies to build the proper onboarding steps, Sb1 called upon fiVISION to utilize memberWORKS as a contact management system to trigger and track activities the credit union uses to keep new members engaged – and ultimately build loyalty.
The member service modules of memberWORKS form an easy-to-use member care platform designed specifically for credit unions. Staff users from many areas within the organization – not just the front line folks – can leverage the intuitive feel and common sense approach deployed within the solution. It provides staff the information and capability at their fingertips that they need and want to be successful serving members.
For example, the Contact Management module provides the ability to capture and record discussions with members easily using “contact categories” or free form text. The Service Request module gives staff an easy way to capture actionable items that are routed to another department or set fulfillment at a later time. Both are supported with reporting capabilities to analyze why members are in contact with various parts of the credit union – such as: “What were the top 25 reasons members called our contact center last week?”
A memberWORKS feature utilized heavily at Sb1 to aid the onboarding process are staged service requests that have “sleep times” set to prompt future-dated activities. A timed service request, for instance, would be “Send member welcome email” or “Send member credit score in two weeks.” The memberWORKS module can schedule many automated timed requests for consistent communication with the member.
In Sb1’s case, the system was set up to prompt a series of about 10 future-dated activities with new members during the first three months of membership. Some examples of the service requests include:
- New member kit
- Welcome email
- Thank you notice
- FICO score
- Month two follow-up letter
- Month three follow-up letter
- Follow up inquiry for products and services offering
memberWORKS is also used at Sb1 to capture a “Member Profile,” looking to learn more about each member by asking a series of questions ranging from “Why did you chose Sb1?” to “Would you be interested in a portfolio review with our Financial Advisor?”
Sb1 has used fiVISION’s memberWORKS since November 2009, and is averaging just under 500 service requests each month related to the onboarding process.
The benefits of these activities are twofold:
- Consistently staying in touch with new members develops strong relationships in the long run. The automated process helps the communication activities stay on track.
- A series of structured questions can lead members to sign up for products and services the credit union offers. The products and services enrich individuals’ memberships, which, in turn, makes the credit union more valuable to them.
“We were looking for a contact management system to improve our onboarding process,” says Tom Swierzy, CEO of Sb1 Federal Credit Union. “We discovered that memberWORKS can help drive our actions, be responsible, and ensure nothing falls through the cracks regarding communication with new members. That’s so important in the beginning.”
Swierzy adds that memberWORKS provides a structured process that fosters responsibility throughout the credit union. It not only sends out timed requests, it tracks them as well for accountability. So the request is either fulfilled or red-flagged for further review. Nothing goes unchecked.
“We believe this technology has really enhanced our member service – especially at the onboarding level,” he says. “It’s a huge advantage for us to plan these timed contacts to new members, which lets them know we’re there for them. We’re not forgetting about them after they sign up. Just knowing that we are simply communicating with new members and nothing is falling through the cracks is very cool.”