Building Digital Delivery Strategy
Today’s world offers more ways for credit unions to deliver their products and services to their members than ever before. Current predominate delivery channels include:
Branches
Contact centers
ATM/ (Personal Teller Machines)
Website with Electronic Banking delivered via:
- PC
- Smart phone
- Tablet
Of those listed, smart phones have shown incredible growth recently. In 2012, Smart phones outsold PCs. In addition, over 50% of all consumers that have cell phones have smart phones. The significance of this to credit unions is that the delivery channel of the smart phone is no longer emerging but very much present and rapidly expanding.
Think of it this way, the future branch of the credit union is the smart phone that your member holds in their hand. This means the credit union has now become incredibly close to the member. Now, the member doesn’t need to find a branch or sit down with their pc to access their account. It’s all right there, in their phone.
More importantly, it secures the need for credit unions to have decisive and robust digital delivery strategy.
As you develop your digital delivery strategy, remember you are building it with the primary goal of creating competitive advantage.
So let’s take a moment and discuss digital delivery strategy:
To create an effective strategy (digital or not) you essentially need the following four components:
- Research
- People
- Plan
- Implement
Each one of these are vitally important but research and people hold substantial weight.
Research:
In this component of your strategy development, you should be gathering all the data you can about:
A) Competition
Defining your key competitors in the digital space and comparing their channel to yours. What are their pricing, service or feature advantages? Or Disadvantages?
B) Process
How effective is your current delivery process?
How well do you bring the member through the marketing decision funnel – from engagement, to purchase, to evangelize?
C) Awareness
Do your members know that you offer digital delivery channel? Are they using it? Are they satisfied with it?
D) Gaps and Feasibility
What gaps do you see in your delivery versus your key competitors? How can you fill them? Should you fill them? And when?
This is important because sometimes you realize that you will need to re-tool, or make a modification to, your channel to improve it. Communicating that to the member is critical to keep engagement and usage.
People:
Do you have the right people at the table to develop the strategy? All of the following areas of the credit union are impacted by digital delivery, so they should be represented in the strategy development.
- Technology
- Retail
- Operations
- Lending
- Marketing
Having the right people working together to build a better digital delivery channel will only make you stronger. It is like the spokes in a wheel…you can have many, you can have few, but you can’t have none.
Digital delivery is not only the credit union’s future, it is the present. It is game changer completely. But never fear, if you craft digital delivery strategy with a clear point of differentiation and collaboration among the organization, you are well on your road to success.
