How credit unions can use technology to improve member satisfaction: Part 1

They have been a member for years. Their monthly deposits keep coming in like clockwork, and there’s no record of account closures, or incidents. They’re never one to complain. But, upon closer inspection, they haven’t opened a new product since paying off their last loan or maybe since transferring their mortgage to a megabank.

The truth is that silence does not always equate to satisfaction. It’s much more nuanced, between the high volume of competitive institutions in the market, and the always-advertising fintechs and neobanks, preferences and behaviors of account holders are shifting. Often, silent account holders have been silently attriting, without their financial institutions even knowing.

To help prevent this silent attrition, top performing credit unions should stop aiming for traditional satisfaction scores, and start focusing on increasing the engagement of their membership. The ultimate goal is to foster active relationships that are mutually beneficial. By giving them the guidance they need now, anticipating what they need next and delivering it, credit unions are building trust that scales.

They’re not just shifting their mindset. To put an end to passive practices in favor of showing up as an active and relevant financial partner to the individuals they serve, they’re also unifying sales and service technologies. Personalized banking should be an integral piece of their strategies through designed and automated experiences that focus on financial journeys.

Invest in technology and platforms and strategies that power data-driven personalization, smart onboarding, and proactive engagement. Satisfaction and loyalty in banking hinges less on the number of digital features a credit union offers, and far more on how seamlessly those features fit into their day-to-day lives.

For example, when account holders are completely satisfied with their financial provider’s digital channels or how their data is used to make relevant product recommendations, they say they are:

Banking technology also helps with a critical variable: Timing. Credit unions can use integrated technology with predictive artificial intelligence and marketing automation, to ensure the institution has time on their side. Allowing them to predict and meet account holders' needs before they are explicitly communicated, positively altering the course of the business and members’ lives.

Imagine a member who has just paid off a car loan. A reactive institution might send a generic "Congrats" email. A predictive institution practicing Anticipatory Banking analyzes that data signal and instead serves a personalized offer for a high-yield savings account, knowing the member now has extra monthly cash flow. This isn't just selling; it's financial advocacy powered by intelligence.

Capital Credit Union started their auto loan campaign with the help of cleansed transaction data turned into customer insights that resulted in a highly targeted audience of members with competitive loans or lease balances, and individuals who had a significant portion of their auto loans paid off.

This approach aimed to capture members before they considered alternative financing options, ultimately resulting in 392 loans worth $9.5 million.

Curious to learn if artificial intelligence could improve upon these results, they then used Alkami’s auto loan cross-sell AI model, which helped them capture prospects that would not have been found otherwise: resulting in an additional 226 new loans worth $5.2 million.

A NET FCU employee contacted a member through an outreach campaign and completed a competitive credit card balance transfer into the credit union and increased the limit. When discussing the member’s other debts, they recommended a home equity line of credit, which saved the member at least $1,700 a month in interest. They also suggested refinancing the member’s recreational vehicle (RV), saving the member money in the long term and cutting three years off of the RV loan.

Technology, like digital sales and service platforms, can scale the human-centricity fundamental to credit unions by providing helpful intelligence and reducing time-consuming tasks such as data cleansing, tagging, modeling, and audience assembly.

With access to usable data insights about the members they’re interacting with, service workers evolve into a new category of knowledge worker: the data-informed banker.  By using technology to surface insights, credit unions allow their staff to have more meaningful, advisory conversations rather than transactional ones. Front line staff, product owners, marketers, loan officers, and more can all be equipped with a narrative: recent spending changes, held-away accounts, pre-approved offers, channel preferences, applications in-flight, and more.

By using behavioral data tags to understand financial stress or opportunity, the digital banking experience can be more than functional, it can be full of possibilities and rewards for its users. For example, if a member’s transactional data indicates subscription overload, or a rising debt service ratio, automations can be activated to provide budgeting tools or debt consolidation calculators.

This approach proves to the member that their credit union is watching out for their financial wellness, not just collecting fees. This shift in behavior can increase engagement frequency, and those who are highly engaged (silent or not) are often the most loyal.

Learn more about the Alkami Digital Sales & Service Platform and how to onboard, engage, and grow your membership at Alkami.com.

Check out Part 2 of this article series to learn more about how reducing friction increases successful outcomes for members and their credit unions.