From “Unlocking Digital Success: Insights from Community Financial Leaders,” a Curinos webinar on February 21, 2024, presented in conjunction with PSCU. The webinar featured Brian Day, solutions consultant at PSCU, Suraya Randawa, head of omnichannel experience at Curinos, and guests Chris Giles, chief experience officer at Maps Credit Union, and Eli Martinez, vice president, digital channels at Wescom Credit Union.
1. Generative AI is at the top of the agenda for 2024.
AI applications abound, and will continue to, from the back end to fraud reduction and UX design, the most notable of which are chatbots and customer interfaces that are readying their interfaces for action and personalization. Home screens and account pages are being redesigned, containers are being developed for specific customer messaging, and even gamification is being used to better engage users. And it’s not limited to national banks and fintechs: FIs of all sizes are actively experimenting.
2. Safely removing friction from applying and onboarding remains a high priority.
The rise of third–party APIs helps pull in and retain deposits by obviating the need for customers and members to enter an account or routing number. Minimizing screens and fields and infusing the experience with support is also crucial to streamline the application, onboarding and funding. All of this increases the chances for fraud, so bulletproof identification and authentication will need to be baked into any origination process while being mindful to minimize frictions to maintain a streamlined experience.
3. Pleasing customers via digital differs from human interaction, but the result should be the same.
Digital interactions don’t bring with them the inferred smile that can come from a phone call, so being welcoming to customers/members and inspiring trust can be more of a challenge. A good digital customer experience comes down to speed of transactions, accuracy and clarity, along with on-demand answers to anticipated questions and help navigating the journey. Instead of customers and members feeling like their money is across town inside a brick building, digital delivery should make them feel that it’s readily available on their phone.
4. How members interact is up to them, but what they may need is up to us.
Creating parity across channels is essential for an effective experience – this means making sure all functions and features are available whether a member/customer interacts via online, mobile, by phone or in a branch. And the journey needs to be cohesive as members go from channel to channel. Tracking that seamless journey through CRM allows FIs to know what members are doing, what they’re looking for and how the institution can anticipate their needs. With the right analytics in place, an FI can propose a solution that responds to an immediate need or, even better, goes beyond what a member or customer thought they needed.
5. Involving customers and members in the measurement process.
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is widely used, but Maps Credit Union adds an outreach call to detractors to uncover the reason for dissatisfaction. It also uses “Member Effort Score” to measure the perceived level of difficulty of an interaction for a member. On top of that, Maps has created a beta version of its app for 4% of its app-active members, so it can push new features out to see how they’re received or to detect any bugs. Wescom CU seeks member feedback whenever making a major change to its systems, online banking, websites or mobile applications, and like Maps, it retains a pool of members who provide feedback continually.
