By Henry Wirz
In his Oct. 12 column for CUES, Pete Duffy invited readers to answer two questions: "What is your credit union's key strategy for promoting its unique brand to unsold customers? What tactics are you using to generate the income to support this strategy?"
In the case of SAFE Credit Union, let me begin by telling what our unique brand is. Our brand promises our members that we will provide them exceptional experiences, best solutions and professional experts to help them improve their financial well being. We believe that members largely believe all financial service providers are the same and that our services are a commodity with little or no difference in value. Most non-members do not understand the difference between a credit union and a bank. Even if they understand that credit unions are member owned and non-profit they don't understand how that benefits them. If they know the credit union is a membership organization they may not be sure who can join.
We believe that we can win the business of non-members by offering them great service that is based on the three brand promise elements: exceptional experiences, best solutions and professional experts. We believe that today banks compete primarily on convenience (location, number of delivery channels and time of service).
Our mystery shop data and media reports tell us that banks have significantly narrowed the service gap with credit unions and are now studying all customer touch points to develop better customer experiences. We believe that due to the size and complexity of most of the national and regional banks we can do a better job and develop our exceptional experiences quicker than they can. In our area, banks hold 75% of the market share while credit unions have the other 25% of deposit accounts. It is our strategy to grow our share of the market.
The tactics we will use are the following:
Exceptional exeriences. We are training our employees to emphasize specific behaviors that we want them to use each time they come in contact with the member. The behaviors all focus on developing respect and trust with our members. We know we have to be very good at all the functional areas such as accuracy, speed and timeliness of service. But we also have to be very good at the realtionship side of the business with specific behaviors.
We want staff to always greet members with a smile, use the member's name, thank them for their business, and offer assistance before the member asks for it. Member trust comes from doing what we said we would do on or before the time we promised it and at or above what was expected. The behaviors we want from staff is to always give a specific date and time by which all requests will be completed. We want staff to respond to all requests the same day they are received giving our expected time of completion.
Member trust comes from a pattern of expected behaviors, the perceived integrity of our staff and the perception that we care about our membrs. If we always do what we say we will do on or before we promised and at or above what we promised we will develop members' respect. We want our staff to show care for members by always acting in the best interest of the member rather than what is best for the credit union. An example is to advise members to move money to the accounts that offer them the best rate even if it only moves money from one SAFE account to another. SAFE always offers existing members the same promotional rates we offer new members. We pay the same rate for old money as we do for new money.
Best Solutions. SAFE constantly innovates new solutions to help our members. We develop new solutions that are innovative. Some recent examples: We offer members instant issue of debit and credit cards in all offices. At the time members apply for a real estate loan we lock in the closing date so that the member never has to ask what day will my loan be completed. Every member who comes to a SAFE office for platform service is either immediately served by our platform staff or if there is no one available we electronically sign in the member so that the first available staff member serves that member. The member's information is automatically pulled up according to his service request so that when the platform representative is ready to serve that member, the request can be very quickly filled.
SAFE members can choose from a menu of automatic e-mail notices that can be sent to them announcing any of a variety of changes to their account. We will soon introduce a new inquiry on our ATMs that tells each member how large a check they can immediately get credit for at all of our ATMs so that they have the confidence to use our ATMs for check cashing.
Professional Experts. SAFE has a number of professional experts to help members with investments, real estate, annuities and remedial financial counseling. Members can make appointments to see these experts to help them improve their financial well being. We know that it takes time for members to develop the trust and respect to turn to one of our staff members for help with their financial well being.
Our tactic is to increase the tenure of our staff so that they can develop long-term relationships with the members who use our offices, call center or Web site for assistance. We are training all of our supervisors and managers in the skills they need to retain staff. We encourage staff to remain in their positions by offering them incentive pay, training and career ladders that encourage service to a group of members for a long time and a long relationship.
Henry Wirz is president of $1.3 billion SAFE Credit Union, North Highlands, Calif.
Read "CU Regulations not the Answer" and "An 'ACE' in the Hole for Small CUs" also by Henry.
