Member experience management – Are you experienced?

There is a new buzz term in town: Customer Experience Management. Recent articles in Forbes, CEO and the Wall Street Journal are just a few examples of how the care and feeding of customers, and the need and ability to drive deeper customer relationships, has become front page news. But for banks and credit unions, being good to customers is no longer just a recommendation, it has the power of federal regulation behind it. The new Consumer Finance Protection Board (CFPB), the federal agency regulating consumer protection in financial services, will take things to a new level with increased monitoring and oversight of financial service customer experience. So making member’s experience memorable has meaning for both business and regulatory aspirations.

Are You Experienced?

What does all of this mean for Credit Unions?  It means that in addition to the business advantages, improving member experience helps keep you compliant with federal regulation as well. Maintaining transparency in the age of social media is a huge challenge for financial institutions today, and credit unions that monitor and manage the experience of members intelligently through process and technology will overcome those barriers while also achieving many important business improvements.

Global Significance

Business leaders worldwide recognize the significant impact of poor customer experiences, yet struggle to develop and execute successful strategies. A recent study conducted by Oracle that surveyed senior-level executives from 18 countries in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America yields new insights on the challenges of succeeding in the customer experience era. Nearly all (97%) of the executives surveyed say that delivering great customer experiences is essential to their success, but only 37% have begun any kind of formal customer experience initiative. Executives cite inflexible technology, siloed organizations and systems, and insufficient investment as the biggest obstacles.

Boost Member Experience

Is it time for better strategies and tactics to manage your member’s experience?  Here are a few areas to consider as you move forward in your efforts.

Customer Journey Redesign – Begin with the end in mind and with an eye to re-configuring the end-to-end customer experience you provide to members. A useful tool is a Customer Journey Map that describes the journey of a user by representing the different touch points during his interaction with your organization.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) – It may be time to re-think member satisfaction and loyalty, and you can do that by measuring your member’s NPS. This customer loyalty metric measures the loyalty that exists between you and your members by asking: How likely are you to recommend our company/product/service to your friends and colleagues?

Unified Brand Experience – Consumers today expect a seamless experience when interacting with your firm no matter how they interact with you. Delivering a coordinated, consistent experience across various services, products and touch points is essential. Brand is everything today so it is important that credit unions deliver a consistently rewarding experience to everyone who comes in contact with the organization.

Member Data Analytics – The more you know about member behavior the better you can adjust and optimize the experience you provide. In turn, these customer insights to improve loyalty and revenue. Data from member behavior should be used to help make key business decisions and to drive market segmentation, direct marketing and predictive analysis.

Moving Forward

As the importance of managing member experience increases, successful credit unions will deliver personalized and seamless customer conversations across all channels and company touch points. This will result in significant improvements in the organizations’ effectiveness on delivering the experiences that customers expect.

One way do this is through the new 366° Degrees platform from OMI.  366° Degrees is a Cloud-based communications management tool that brings all of your member communications into one easy to use platform — no matter what form they take. You can easily do things like message personalization, target segmentation and in-depth campaign analytics. Easily reach across communication channels in social media, mobile and online formats and then quickly analyze the effectiveness of those social connections. Find out more today by visiting www.omi.co