Secrets of Member Service Success
CUNA’s Credit Union Front Line newsletter recently asked Carla Schrinner, implementation manager and senior master trainer for CUNA’s Creating Member Loyalty™ program, to share a few secrets of member service success. Here are her thoughts, based on her 22 years of helping credit unions incorporate a member loyalty emphasis into their sales and service culture.
What’s your biggest advice for staff in sales and service positions?
Every time you interact with a member—whether it’s by phone, face-to-face, or online—is an opportunity to learn something about that member and to leverage it. Members don’t visit your branches for checking accounts, loans, or CDs. They have underlying needs or concerns they must address.
Your job is to figure out what’s driving each member’s need and to help them meet it. When you can do that, you move from merely order-taking to really becoming a trusted financial partner.
Please share an example of how a simple change in approach can make a big difference in sales and service success?
I routinely ask senior teams and managers a simple question: “What happens in your credit union when a member comes in or calls to change his or her address?” Generally, they answer with the detailed specifics behind their process for handling these requests—from asking for identification, to sending out letters of confirmation to the old address, to how change forms are completed and imaged.
