By John Spence
I am not an economist or a futurist. I am more of a “todayist,” focused on what is happening right now. When I look at my clients around the world, they are nervous. The instability in global financial markets, geopolitical strife, Brexit, trade wars and more have everyone on edge. And because of the interconnectedness of the entire globe, what happens on the other side of the world has a direct impact on you, your credit union and your members. During the Great Recession, I was coaching several CEOs in various industries, but my advice for each of them was the same: Be world-class at the basics — that’s also my recommendation to you. There are three key areas to focus on.
1. It's All About People
The success of your credit union is 100 percent dependent on the quality of your team. Because you operate in a highly regulated industry, you cannot offer products and services that are too different from those of your competitors, which means one of the only places where you can stand out is in the quality of the people you can get, grow and keep. Onboarding, training and development, culture and career pathing must be major strategies for your business. As a senior executive, your most important “customers” are your employees. Take great care of them, and they will take great care of your members. Remember: The member’s experience will never exceed the employee’s experience.
2. Understand Your Members and Their Needs
Most organizations I work with are pathetic at deeply listening to their customers, which is mind-boggling to me because your customers (members) are the people who pay all the bills. Regardless of the programs you already have in place, you probably need to double or triple your efforts. How many of these member feedback tools are you using?
- Online surveys
- In-person interviews
- Focus groups of current members
- Focus groups of potential members
- VIP member groups
- New member groups
- Social media
- Member feedback panels
- Lunch or dinner with key members
You should also apply many of these with your partners, such as car dealerships, homebuilders, real estate companies, mortgage brokers and other organizations that will refer business and new members. If someone gives you money (or could), you should be investing the time and effort to create a strong personal relationship with them and, once established, make it extremely difficult for your competition to steal them away.
3. Always Deliver Superior Member Service
Now that you have the best people on your team and you truly understand your members, the next step is to consistently surprise and delight them with the outstanding service that everyone in your organization delivers. When I ask credit unions across the country what makes them so different from their competitors, I always get some version of “We deliver outstanding and personalized member service.” Unfortunately, that is rarely true.
If you’re going to hang your hat on superior member service, then you need to have superior member service training and processes in place.
- Hire for a great service attitude.
- Fire for a poor service attitude.
- Create member service standards, procedures and processes.
- Train, train and train some more on how to deliver world-class member service.
- Celebrate great service delivery.
- Deliver great service internally to each other.
- Make sure the senior management team models superior member service.
- Use member loyalty and satisfaction as a key metric.
Sure, there are lots of other things you can do to survive a recession: close branches, downsize your staff, cut your marketing and advertising budget, become hypervigilant on every expenditure, drive like crazy for more efficiency. But before you consider any of these, ask yourself whether you are so superior at the basics that everyone in your community clearly sees you as the best option.
Be so good they can’t ignore you.
John Spence is recognized as one of the top 100 business thought leaders and one of the top 500 leadership development experts in the world. He is an international keynote speaker and management consultant and has written five books on business and life success.
The new Leadership Download column provides credit union executives with insights into running successful businesses.
This article was published in the January-February 2020 edition of The NAFCU Journal magazine.
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