Four Reasons Credit Unions Should Modernize Member Communication

With today’s world gone so fully digital, there has never been a more relevant time to elevate the discussion on effective communication.

After all, the growth, success and loyalty of members to your credit union can rise and fall with your ability to communicate. When it comes to your communication strategies, you need to ask yourself the right questions.

• Do members hear from you at the right times, through the best avenues of delivery?
• Is your communication personalized, informative and helpful? Is it often enough?
• Are you using a customer communication management system to streamline communications? Importantly, is that system cost effective and easy to use?
• At bottom, are you creating an experience that is remarkable and differentiating?

The purpose of effectively communicating with your members is adding value to their ongoing experiences, to make their interactions and choices easier. Effective communication centers on presenting the right message to the right people at the right time, in a consistent cadence that meets member needs.

But if you’re not using effective CCM to automate the time-consuming components—and are manually assembling your communications from disparate sources like documentation, variable data and information stored in various systems—the process of communicating overtakes the true value, which is creating and delivering messaging that resonates and builds relationships.

We’re not talking about just sending a random email and walking away.

4 Ways CCM Elevates the Customer Experience

Customer experience is rapidly emerging as the top priority for businesses today. According to CXM Transformation, a recent Aspire report on customer experience management, a focus on CX is the top priority for almost two-thirds of businesses. The report provides four objectives a CCM needs to meet to deliver on CX goals. They are:

1.    Focus on quality content

The savviest CXM enterprises deliver high-quality, high-engagement content. A modern CCM facilitates relevant messaging that aligns the consumer’s journey with your institution, which Aspire deems “the essential core of quality CX in B2C communications.”

The right CCM solution delivers this through:

• Accurate and up-to-date correspondence that automatically pulls data from multiple sources across the enterprise, such as core systems
• A document designer function that easily allows business process owners to author and manage document content
• Omni-channel distribution that helps get the right message to the right people, via the best channels of communication—whether it’s email, print, SMS text or another avenue

2.    Deliver agility and high-powered workflows

As organizations move increasingly to agile, low-code solutions, CCM users must have the ability to use tools, add-ons and plug-ins to drive cost-effectiveness, usability and efficiency. Workflows that not only move business along, but also create visibility within the system allow CXM specialists to customize their processes effectively.

That’s why you should look for a CCM solution that integrates easily with your enterprise applications and productivity software.

3.    Provide consistency across all channels

A modern CCM delivers a creative environment that helps users manage and develop complex documents by:

• Centralizing management for text blocks, processes, scripts and more
• Empowering member and CXM specialists to create and update their own templates in Microsoft Word
• Implementing component inheritance, so downstream templates are updated when the base template is revised
• Protecting brand integrity, so every communication promotes the voice, look and vision of your organization

4.    Deploy in the cloud

Aspire’s research found that organizations with high CXM maturity were almost seven times more likely to migrate CCM to the cloud than CXM laggards. The cloud provides faster and easier deployment, alleviates in-house IT burdens and delivers significant savings by allowing scalability.

But where do you start? Financial institutions should look for cloud capabilities that help CCM solutions deploy more effectively by outperforming on-premises deployments in areas including:

• Higher levels of system availability and uptime
• Quicker disaster recovery—cyber, physical or workforce-related
• Improved flexibility across the enterprise
• Lower costs through the elimination of hardware installation and IT equipment
• Easier ecosystem scalability

CCM Is the Foundation

CCM helps make your credit union the obvious choice, amidst so many options emerging and available today.

It’s that important. The time is now to elevate your strategic focus on CXM and leverage the digital power of CCM.

When a powerful customer communications management solution integrates with your core systems, automates time-consuming tasks and eliminates user error when pulling data from multiple sources, it saves critical time for critical communications. With a great CCM tool, you can easily and consistently deliver accurate, relevant, personalized customer correspondence for all the members in your credit union in the particular way each of them wants to communicate—effectively increasing valuable engagement, while decreasing the effort to do so.

As technology rapidly evolves in our digital world, so do the expectations of your members. Every experience needs to be meaningful—and personal. By integrating with enterprise applications and office productivity software, CCM solutions reduce the time and effort it takes to create individually personalized content, enabling you to focus on what really matters.

Steve Comer is director of the financial services and insurance industries at CUESolutions provider Hyland Software, Westlake, Ohio. For more than 13 years, Steve has been dedicated to helping the financial services industry transform through using Hyland’s enterprise information platform, leveraging the industry-leading capabilities that OnBase provides in enterprise content management/content services, business process management, intelligent capture and case management capabilities. He is proud to lead one of the most dynamic teams at one of the most dynamic companies serving one of the most dynamic and transformative industries.