Making your members happy is key to earning their loyalty and keeping them for the long-term. Creating an organization capable of delivering a quality experience is critical to achieving this objective. Here are four fundamentals to help you establish repeatable, effective processes that deliver experiences worthy of loyalty:
1. Identifying Moments of Truth
While you can please members with excellent rewards programs or convenient banking solutions, it is often the seemingly insignificant interactions between members and employees that can decide how a member perceives your credit union. When a member is emotionally invested in a specific transaction, credit union employees must be ready to handle this ‘moment of truth’—or risk losing that member for good.
Perhaps a member is frustrated with how cumbersome it was to apply for a loan, or maybe they are just having a bad day and taking it out on your staff. In both of these situations, there is a moment of truth when your employee will either handle the interaction correctly and please the member, or they will lose the member forever. In order for you to identify these moments and train your staff for future interactions, your credit union should consider using instant, real-time surveys.
2. Recover from Your Mistakes
In order to fix a problem, you first need to find out exactly what the problem is. By using surveys, you can identify where and when the moment of truth occurred. Real-time survey programs such as LiveSurvey can send surveys out to members within minutes of the transaction, allowing you to get feedback and rectify the situation as quickly as possible. This could make the difference between retaining the member and watching them walk out the door, never to return. It can also help keep those negative complaints from reaching your Facebook page for everyone to see.
3. Identify Coachable Moments
Surveys also allow credit union managers to measure their staff’s performance and coach them in areas that need improvement. While we all try to hire staff that have amazing customer service skills, there will be times when mistakes are made. With real-time surveys, managers can pinpoint where their employees went wrong and correct the behavior to avoid making the same mistake in the future.
There will also be instances where members are upset and your employees did nothing to cause this reaction. In these cases, surveys are vital for recognizing that the employee was not in the wrong. Even when it is not the fault of the employee, all managers should be training them to handle members who are emotionally invested in the interaction. It is important to keep in mind that these moments of truth also impact the employee. Even if the situation was not caused by the employee, it is important to provide them with feedback or you could risk losing good employees as well.
4. Be Prepared to Perform
The truth is that many credit union employees are not trained to identify and handle these moments of truth. It isn’t enough to just capture these moments and try to correct them, but you must also train staff how to handle the next Moment of Truth when it occurs. To stand apart from the competition, use examples of these moments as tools to train staff how to be prepared. Doing this will allow you to seize these moments and avoid losing members forever.
