7 minutes
Thanks to technology and social media platforms, consumers today are more empowered than ever before. They research every potential purchase and interaction, no matter how trivial, before committing. Comparative websites like Yelp! and Google Reviews provide social platforms for consumers to share experiences, complete with grades and comments. In fact, millennial consumers are more likely to take advice from strangers online than they are from the companies’ employees.
Companies that succeed in this new environment take an active role in building continual conversation channels between their customers and the company’s executives. After all, how well can the company adjust its offerings to meet the expectations of its customers if it doesn’t bother to ask?
Surveys are an effective tool but most of the time they aren’t providing actionable information to management because they aren’t asking the right questions to the right members at the right time.
Here are five critical things your current member survey isn’t telling you:
1. Member Satisfaction Doesn’t Matter
Credit unions love to crow about their exemplary member satisfaction scores, particularly compared to banks. But if our members are so satisfied, why is it such a constant fight to grow? Your survey doesn’t answer that for you because satisfaction doesn’t necessarily equate to loyalty, and that’s what we should care about.
There are two types of consumer loyalty: attitudinal loyalty (how a consumer feels about the company and its products) and behavioral loyalty (how much business the consumer actually transacts with the company). A consumer may be attitudinally loyal to a company like Tom’s, the shoe company that donates a pair of shoes for every pair it sells, but she may not actually OWN any Tom’s shoes. Other consumers may be behaviorally loyal to a company like Walmart, but only because they don’t have better alternatives available.
The bottom line is that credit unions need to see both types of loyalty, and your member survey doesn’t capture all the important elements.
2. Reduce Member Effort
A few years ago, the CEB conducted a three-year study of more than 70,000 consumers in an attempt to understand what builds loyalty in service environments. The study had two critical findings:
- Delighting your customers does not build loyalty. Reducing customer effort (by making it simpler to do business with you) builds loyalty.
- Acting on this insight can improve business results and reduce expenses.
This is especially interesting because most CUs stress exceeding their members’ expectations in every transaction. In fact, many CUs have built these expectations into their mission or vision statements. One passage from the CEB study in particular stands out:
“Telling reps to exceed expectations is apt to yield confusion, wasted time and effort, and costly giveaways. Instead, stress the concept of making it easy.”
The point is simple: The easier it is for your members to do business with you, the more business they’ll do with you. Your member surveys, including daily transactional surveys, should gauge that effort.
Further inquiries should yield specific ways in which the credit union can make it even easier for the members. For instance, if the member responds that it was difficult to change their address with the CU, your survey should ask how it could have been made simpler. Some members may respond with “make it available to accomplish online” while others may say “branch operating hours are inconvenient.” Weighing the responses will help management determine which initiatives should be undertaken first.
3. Your Members’ Key Drivers
Your surveys may provide volumes of information, but they aren’t defining the most important aspects of your business, according to your members. Understanding these key drivers will enable management to allocate resources to reduce effort and improve results.
Many credit unions utilize Net Promoter Score to predict future business results. This decade-old metric is widely recognized as the best indicator of attitudinal loyalty, and ample results are available for peer comparisons.
Typically, credit unions score between 50 and 60 on their Net Promoter Scores. For comparison, most of the Big Four banks have a negative NPS. (USAA continues to be the standard-bearer in financial services with its NPS consistently above 80).
To understand your members’ key drivers, your survey should follow up the NPS response with an inquiry to understand why members responded how they did. Additionally, the survey should prompt members to offer one thing to change about the CU. Finally, members should be asked to grade the CU again if the institution actually made the change suggested by the member.
Of course, asking these questions isn’t enough. You must analyze and organize the responses in a meaningful way. Gathering these various responses and calculating the weighted improvements from the various suggestions will yield actionable insights for the management team.
Thousands of responses like this can be evaluated and quantified to identify specific projects or initiatives that could be undertaken. These can be organized into key driver categories that correspond to the credit union’s value proposition (superior value, convenient access, etc.).
4. Who is Saying What, Exactly?
Your member surveys probably provide demographic perspective to the responses. For instance, members of this branch reported this, millennial members reported that. To accomplish this, the survey likely asks members unnecessary questions to qualify their responses. Does your survey, for example, ask members when they joined the credit union? Does it ask if the member has a checking account with your credit union? Shouldn’t you already know that?
Frankly, what does it say to your member about your credit union if you need to ask them these questions? Respondents experience survey fatigue when you unnecessarily ask questions, causing response rates to go down.
Further, your surveys aren’t assigning specific responses to individual accounts. Sure, you know 25 percent of your members responded that they would be in the market for a new car in the next year, but do you know which 25 percent? You know 60 percent of your members responded that they would refer a friend or family member to the credit union, but do you know which members?
Finally, an important component of behavioral loyalty is account growth of specific households. How else to demonstrate behavioral loyalty than to actually increase the number of accounts or balances one has with the credit union?
To accomplish this, your surveys must integrate directly into your core system, marketing customer information file, or member relationship management platform. Doing so provides substantially more background information to improve your ability to analyze responses and, ultimately, improves your ability to make sound marketing decisions. Connecting this information to the core system begins with initially extracting more data than simple contact information (e.g. demographic data, relationship status) and appending it upon survey completion. The depth of the data will depend on what’s available to you and your core/MCIF platform. Your survey provider should be able to help you.
5. The Big Picture
The most successful companies in the world have comprehensive mechanisms to gather and analyze consumer insights continuously. For instance, visitors to a Disney theme park may have encountered cast members equipped with electronic clipboards performing quick surveys with park guests. Disney performs millions of these surveys every year, and the responses help them make “on the fly” improvements to the guests’ experiences.
Your member survey program should be comparably comprehensive. It must be more than an annual (or bi-annual) satisfaction survey. It should include transactional surveys for teller line, member service, and call center transactions. These daily surveys should be conducted as close to the time of the interaction as possible, and the interactions should be more than simple monetary transactions.
Your program should include surveys for new memberships and other new accounts. These surveys in particular will help quantify member effort, and can generate numerous process improvements. Sometimes they can also yield cross-selling opportunities potentially missed at the time of the account opening.
Your program should also include surveys for members who have recently left the credit union. One of the major findings of the customer effort study was the importance of leveraging feedback from disgruntled members to improve the experience of current members.
Taken together, these surveys will help your credit union make better decisions about its future.
Jim Kasch is the founder of Member Intelligence Group, which helps credit unions gain actionable insights from their members through surveys. He can be reached at jkasch@canidaeconsulting.com.
