Who Holds the Keys to Your Member Experience?
Mike Manahan
Connecting customer experience and marketing strategy
Innovative credit unions are picking up on the need to elevate their member experience. Some are appointing CXOs or "Chief Experience Officers" to lead the charge. But no matter the title, someone at your CU should oversee this integral part of your business, and drive the improvements and growth you need. This panel of CXOs will discuss common challenges and opportunities for creating new products and attracting new members. You'll have an opportunity to discuss ideas and share best practices. Use this setting to gather solutions to take back to the office for immediate implementation.
Panelists will include Carrie Geyer, VP/chief member experience officer at River City FCU, Chris Sundlof, VP of member experience at Arlington Community FCU, and Michelle Spellerberg, VP, digital strategy & innovative growth at Alliant CU.
Listen to Mike talk about focusing on member experience to differentiate from other fintech providers.
Interview transcript available below. Don't see the play button? Download the audio file.
More about Mike
Mike is the senior vice president of banking and credit unions at Total Expert, a marketing and customer experience platform provider. He is responsible for oversight of the company’s go-to market strategy into the banking and credit union business unit. Prior to joining Total Expert, Mike was most recently the Vice President of Relationship Management at Q2 where he was responsible for the sales, revenue growth & retention strategies for the Relationship Management organization. Prior to his time at Q2, Mike has held various sales, sales leadership, executive client relationship management, and business development roles with Intuit, Carreker Corporation (now part of Fiserv), and Diebold Incorporated. Mike has his Bachelor of Business Administration from Saint Bonaventure University.
You can find Mike on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Total Expert is a NAFCU Preferred Partner.
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Anthony Demangone: I am here today with Mike Manahan, the senior vice president of banking and credit unions at Total Expert. He is going to be moderating a killer panel at our upcoming Strategic Growth Conference in San Antonio.
I’m looking at this credit union industry and I’m seeing titles I haven’t seen before. On our panel, we’ve got a member experience officer, a chief experience officer, a VP of digital marketing and innovation growth. Mike, what’s going on? Why this sudden focus on the member, member, member experience?
Mike Manahan: A big thing from what I see as we’re crossing the country and talking to different credit unions is the competition and the focus on really trying to be that primary financial institution is stronger than ever. Not only do you have the traditional competition with banks against the credit unions themselves, but, as you take a look around, you’ve obviously got an increasing amount of competition that’s taking place from different fintech providers in the space that are chipping away at various memberships and the opportunities that you’ve got to expand your relationship with your membership base.
So, what we see is that there are an awful lot of financial institutions like you talked about that are out there adding this specific line of business to be able to really focus on and drive that differentiated member experience for the members, so that way credit unions have the way of really differentiating themselves from this new form of competition as well as the old competition. But yet, really going back to driving the focus on being that primary financial institution.
AD: I know that at Total Expert you and others go around the country, talking to organizations, helping them down this path. At this panel, what do you expect that attendees are going to get from this conversation and this deep dive into member experience?
MM: Member experience is one of those things where it can turn into a buzzword. You can hear it in an awful lot of different places. But what I think is really important for those who are going to attending is to really be able to walk away with some tangible examples of what can be done to improve that member experience and go back to drive to be that primary financial institution. We want to make sure that as folks are here they can hear stories and examples that they can relate to, that they can take back, that are pretty easy to try to go ahead and differentiate themselves in their market.
AD: Mike, also, I think as you’re going out and you’re championing this thought of experience, is there a story or a statistic that you like to throw out to people that makes a lightbulb go on or dispels a myth about member experience and its importance?
MM: I can give a very personal example that I think is relevant and I think it really hits home. Recently, I went out and purchased a car. And, in doing so, I was offered a loan that turned out to be from a credit union that I’m now a member of. Now, if you think about it, in order to get that loan, I had to provide my income and a whole bunch of different data. They ran my credit and whatnot and then bang I’m approved for the loan. About two weeks after I got the paperwork all taken care of, I got a letter from this credit union that basically stated, “hey thanks for everything and if you ever need anything, come by the branch.”
That was about two months ago and I haven’t really heard anything since. I use that as an example because this is an area where a credit union has got so much information. They’ve got my credit score, they’ve got my age, they’ve got my income. They’ve got so much there that they could really ratchet it up to where they could be hyper-focused on the humanization in their approach to me, based on financial tools that the credit union has that are relevant to me. But yet, it’s a missed opportunity. I just don’t happen to be into the market because we recently moved not too long back to start a new relationship with a financial institution. And here’s a great opportunity but it’s being missed out on.
I think there are things like this that we see that are such great opportunities that don’t take a lot of heavy lifting to where we see there’s such great upside that could be had in the credit union market.
AD: Mike, any final thoughts?
MM: I’m really excited about getting to spend some time and work with folks at the conference and going through and moderating with the great folks we’ll have joining me onstage. And again, my main goal is to be able to provide some tangible takeaways for folks so they can go back to their credit unions to be able to apply easily and to really help differentiate themselves in the market.
AD: That’s fantastic! Ladies and gentlemen, Mike Manahan from Total Expert. And we’ll see all of you in San Antonio from March 2-4 at NAFCU’s Strategic Growth Conference.