Credit unions have two options when it comes to the voice of the member:

Listen or ignore.

If you listen to the voice of the member, you may uncover better strategic options and direction. If you ignore them, you have to trust that you what your members need better than they do.

That said, balancing your credit union’s overall strategy with member wants can feel like walking a tightrope. Fortunately, member surveys consistently deliver valuable insights.

Here are 15 ways surveys can improve your credit union:

  1. Product and Service Development: Member surveys allow you to gather invaluable insight into what your members really want, enabling you to develop new products or refine existing ones that truly meet their needs.
  2. Member Satisfaction: Surveys are your members’ voice. They give you a clear picture of member happiness and can highlight any areas where you may need to up your game.
  3. Member Support Evaluation: Sending surveys after support interactions can help you understand the strengths and weaknesses of your member service reps, allowing you to make necessary improvements.
  4. Website and App Usability Testing: Good UI and UX are key to member satisfaction in the digital age. Surveys can reveal how user-friendly your website and app are and pinpoint areas for improvement.
  5. Net Promoter Score (NPS) Tracking: With a simple question—”How likely are you to recommend us?”—you can measure the loyalty of your members, a crucial metric in today’s competitive landscape.
  6. Event Evaluation: Hosting a webinar or in-person event? Post-event surveys are perfect for gauging attendee satisfaction and collecting suggestions for future events.
  7. Onboarding Process Feedback: First impressions count. Surveys can help you perfect the onboarding process for your members, ensuring their journey with you starts off on the right foot.
  8. Target Market Analysis: Surveys can help you paint a more vivid picture of your target market’s preferences, behaviors, and financial needs.
  9. Member Retention: Prevent churn by identifying potential issues before they lead to a lost member. If a member isn’t happy, that’s your cue to swoop in and solve the problem.
  10. Branch Performance Analysis and Expansion Planning: Ready to close a branch, but you want to know which one? Thinking about opening a new branch or ATM, but you’re not sure where there’s demand? Some companies can use complex data models to find the answer for you, but a survey can certainly get you started.
  11. Assessing Financial Education Initiatives: Collect feedback on your financial education programs. Surveys can measure their impact and help you improve future initiatives.
  12. Strategic Decision Making: Surveys give you insights directly from your members. This data can shape the direction of your credit union and align your decisions with your members’ needs.
  13. Regulatory Compliance: Regular surveys can demonstrate to regulators that you’re actively engaging with members and addressing any issues—helping to meet compliance requirements. In a world where fees—especially NSF fees—are becoming a battleground, this could be key.
  14. Benchmarking Performance: Use survey data to compare your performance to industry averages or other credit unions, revealing where you excel and where you could improve.
  15. Improving Member Communication: Survey your members to assess how well your communications are received and understood. You might also learn about who prefers email, SMS (text), phone, snail mail, etc. This is particularly useful for credit unions who want to optimize their omnichannel communications strategy.

If you don’t already have a survey program up and running, this list might seem overwhelming… especially when you consider that it’s both general and not exhaustive.

But for credit unions new to surveys, it’s best to start with some form of member satisfaction survey. We recommend the Member Effort Score for most things. Net Promoter Score (NPS) is good too, if you remember to take it with a grain of salt.

And if you’re not sure which survey platform to use, you have options. Compare 5 different credit union survey platforms here.