Marci Francisco on leadership (in a crisis)

Marci Francisco is the senior vice president of member experience at Premier America Credit Union ($2.9B, Chatsworth, CA), a position she has held since April 2019. Here, she answers Callahan’s leadership questions about her credit union’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. 

Between the beginning of 2020 and now, how have your operations changed?

Marci Francisco: We are a completely different organization from what we were at the beginning of 2020. We are in the middle of a digital revolution. We converted cores at the end of last year, and we had significant initiatives lined up for this year that were part of a five-year plan. We’re in the middle of launching a new CRM, searching for a new online banking provider, reconsidering our brand, and looking into new products. Even though we were in the middle of a pandemic and we didn’t know what the future held, we kept moving forward knowing our member’s needs were evolving. We’ve done in a matter of weeks what would have taken a year or a year-and-a-half.

We didn’t have a work-from-home policy at the beginning of this, and we moved 65% of the team to remote work within about three weeks. We changed our legacy call center phone system so we could break the call center into five mini centers while we worked to set up remote capability. We were concerned if one person was infected, the whole department could be impacted. So, we designated small rooms where we could house three or four call center employees until we could purchase laptops, headsets, and other necessities to send these folks home.

 

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