After visiting a branch to discuss finances, one of your members decides they need a new product—let’s say it’s a credit card. They get home and go to your website to explore their options. After they find what they’re looking for, they begin the application process on your mobile app.
But wait! Something goes wrong…
Now they’re on the phone with your contact center to resolve the issue. After resolution, they get an email, or a push notification, or a text message (it doesn’t matter which).
The member experience today spans in-person and digital experiences and across many devices and channels. In fact, the member journey, from end to end, can be wide-ranging and sometimes disjointed. How can credit unions connect the dots of the member experience to create a cohesive picture?
In this blog, we’ll look at customer experience management (CXM) and the leading provider of CXM in the credit union industry, OvationCXM.
What Is CXM for Credit Unions?
CXM is a software or platform that allows credit unions to manage and optimize all aspects of the member experience. With CXM, credit unions can define, customize, and individualize member journeys to be personalized, seamless, and friction free.
CXM shouldn’t be confused with a CRM (customer relationship management). A CRM is a sales and marketing platform that finds and measures sales opportunities with members. But a CRM doesn’t have the innate capabilities to manage the member’s experience throughout different touchpoints and across the ecosystem. Until now, organizations tried to force their CRM and other legacy systems to build and monitor member experiences, but problems like high member churn, lower revenue, and poor member satisfaction scores remain unchanged. These platforms were never built to solve for these problems.
This is why the CXM software market has exploded and is becoming the technology of choice to ensure members are seen and taken care of at every milestone.
A CXM doesn’t require re-architecture of existing credit union systems however. It’s a middle layer between the credit union’s core systems and its member-facing platforms and channels. It pulls interaction information from these siloed systems and aggregates it into one portal, in a shared view that everyone can see for full visibility, communication, and collaboration.
Why Do Credit Unions Need a CXM?
Because the member experience is increasingly fractured and omnichannel, spread across departments, devices, and third-party ecosystem partners, the power of a CXM is in its ability to unify that fractured member experience.
Consider the reality of your credit union’s member-facing tech stack:
There’s the CRM to manage the member sales and marketing opportunities. There’s a CCM to handle chatbots, messaging, and the contact center. There are products for loan origination, savings round-ups, autonomous finance, credit checks, personalized offers, self-driving finance, and more.
Ultimately, a credit union CXM brings all the pieces of member experience together (and improves it). Instead of a patchwork mess of disconnected technologies, mobile apps, brick and mortar experiences, online encounters, and contact centers, a CXM stitches the lot together into a cohesive quilt. And it does it all in real time.
The Case for Ovation CXMEngine
We first came across OvationCXM when we wrote about our list of top credit union CRMs. What we discovered when writing about CRMs was that CRMs didn’t solve for member experience outside of products and marketing—rather, there was a whole world of onboarding, servicing, and support interactions and engagement that still needed to be accounted for.
OvationCXM helps credit unions automate and orchestrate the entire member experience from sales and onboarding to 10+ years in. Their CXMEngine connects all member touchpoints—digital and physical, in-house and from vendors—into one seamless journey.
You can think of CXMEngine as a single, configurable source of truth for all parts of the member experience. You can see how any given member interacts with your credit union. You can create better support across departments and channels. You gain line of sight into everything that touches your member’s experience in a single screen, no toggling required. It’s honestly pretty cool.
CXM platforms are relative newcomers to the enterprise world. Traditional CXM platforms have used member feedback after the fact to improve journeys, but so far, OvationCXM is the only CXM platform that works specifically with credit unions to aggregate real-time information from multiple systems to guide a member journey. Information housed in siloed legacy systems are pulled into a shared view. Everyone can see where the member is at, next steps, and how to guide them ahead if they are stuck. This proactive approach fixes broken journeys before they lead to frustration that drags down business outcomes. And it does it without changing the tech stack. Instead it changes how the member experiences the tech stack!
Why is this important?
It’s important because in a world of connections, automations, and member journeys, turnkey is key. If you want seamless member experiences across multiple departments, technologies, and vendors, you’ll almost certainly need modules that can be ready to go out of the box.
Because, let’s be honest, orchestrating a world of individualized member experience journeys that move seamlessly across different departments and third-party ecosystem providers is nearly impossible to do without help.
A CXM platform tames the chaos that comes from highly complicated ecosystems common to large, credit unions, but small to mid-sized organizations also benefit because they too are expanding their partnerships to bring new offerings to their members more quickly than they could build them alone. As credit unions and fintechs form more numerous partnerships (the inevitable future!), the member journey will be delivered by an increasing number of providers. Members will expect credit unions of all sizes to deliver a smooth, intuitive interaction, and CXM makes it possible. It’s time for our industry to think about connecting the dots…
Sooner, rather than later.
Additional Resources
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