5 minutes
An end-to-end solution that works well with your team and processes is the solid path to modern, differentiated MX.
Consumers have long joined credit unions for their local community commitment, competitive rates and personalized service. Essential for membership growth and competitiveness, high-touch services must now equally include both in-person service and digital interactions, particularly for the rising digital-first generations. In response, credit unions are turning to technology to modernize the member experience.
Technologies for modern member experiences extend to fintech, like online banking and peer-to-peer payments like Zelle or Venmo. But they also encompass omnichannel customer experience and contact center technologies. After all, these technologies allow credit unions to grow by cost-effectively and easily combining their well-known in-person engagement with digital member engagement.
The Cloud Contact Center and Its Role in Modernizing Member Experiences
A cloud contact center is an application hosted on the Internet that handles customer communications. Generally, it allows credit union customer experience teams to deal with all member interactions—including phone calls, email, texts, social media, video, web and webchats—In one centralized application.
Empower employees and agents to provide extraordinary member experiences. Since a cloud contact center is easily accessed via browser, credit union customer experience teams can work from anywhere. In addition, since all interactions are kept in a single location—all knowledge from various databases and systems unified into a single view—employees have fast, ready access to accurate, up-to-date and consistent information.
Improve satisfaction with self-service. Having a centralized place for all interactions also makes it easier for customers to do business with your credit union. Flexible automation can provide members with greater levels of personalized self-service to fast answers to common questions.
Provide consistent service across all member touchpoints. A cloud contact center gives all members freedom to choose how to engage with the credit union. A transaction can be completed online, via mobile, in a branch, with a call center representative, on a voice device or even using video. All the while, a cloud contact center lets credit unions deliver the same brand experience in real-time, every time and however a member engages.
Improve all CX or MX metrics. Deployed in hours, and flexible enough to be changed in minutes, a cloud contact center can reduce employee agent error rates, abandon rates and average handle time. At the same time, these contact centers improve first-call resolution, service levels, member satisfaction Net Promoter Scores and member retention.
Grow membership. Grow your credit union. A better member experience leads to more members. Look at $151 billion Navy Federal Credit Union, which ranks No. 1 in Forrester’s 2021 awards for customer service among multichannel banks/credit unions and in the top 5% of all brands. Robust customer experience technology, people and processes make this possible.
Finally, a cloud contact center’s powerful data and artificial intelligence can make it possible for a credit union of any size to provide differentiated, modern member experiences.
And the secret to how? It’s all in the cloud contact center features and functions.
Features and Functions for Developing Differentiated Member Experiences
Delivering a differentiated member experience starts with the technology. Often, you must integrate multiple systems and ever-changing, best-of-breed software as a service apps with your cloud contact center to differentiate and deepen member relationships.
But differentiation can’t result from complexity. Why? Because if the systems are too complex, credit union CX teams spend too much time managing those systems than innovating the member experience.
Instead, grow differentiation using the simplicity of an end-to-end cloud contact center. An end-to-end cloud contact center includes 80% of the basic CX functions that modern contact centers must use today. This includes call routing, reporting, drag-and-drop workflow management, true omni-channel support and an in-built customer data platform.
This customer data platform is a single, integrated data environment, or knowledge system, to keep CX teams nimble with changing demands. In addition, intuitive, low-code and no-code interfaces enable real-time contact center workflow changes.
Use automation to adapt to emerging communications channel or demand changes. Add automation and artificial intelligence to that single data environment, and it brings the ability to automate new workflows on the fly.
Thus, cloud contact center usage can rise and fall with changing member demand and teams can easily adapt—making for shorter wait times, faster issue resolution and happier members.
Customize with granular business rules to easily enable personalize member experiences. For example, your credit union can automate to customize “next best actions.” This could be more granular business rules or what the automated system or agent does—and, of course, based on the type of member or their products to personalize self-service.
Granular rules are also key to offering members privacy choices around more than just how their data is used. They help credit unions extend control of actions taken with that data to members themselves.
For instance, credit unions can give members the ability to decide if they want alerts on new deposits, completed payments, low balances or special offers. You can also give members choices on whether they want those alerts, which ones they want, and if they want to receive them via text or email.
Ultimately, an end-to-end cloud contact center with customization and extensibility gives credit unions the ability to streamline and innovate modern member experience journeys and workflows. It reduces the need to integrate multiple platforms, CX apps and vendors together and lengthy integration periods. Additionally, an end-to-end cloud contact center improves operations for employees serving members, the supervisors who manage them and the IT teams in charge of infrastructure.
The result, of course, is cost-savings. A cloud contact center also eliminates the risk of maintaining multiple systems, while giving credit unions all the advantages of best-of-breed CX applications.
Lastly, and most importantly, an end-to-end cloud contact center solution that easily works with your team and processes is the best path to modern member experiences with differentiation.
Andrew Casson is a longtime network engineer and telecommunications and contact center architect. He’s currently a VP for CUES Supplier member Content Guru, Campbell, California, maker of the highly-acclaimed storm®, an all-in-one contact center-as-a-service solution with industry-leading functionality, performance, reliability and flexibility.
