CUSO’s Solution Focuses on Relationship Building as Bottom Line
8/26/2009
[AS PRINTED IN THE 08/26/09 EDITION OF CREDIT UNION TIMES]
By: Marc Rapport
Wescom Resources Group has rolled out a new member relationship management solution that sets itself apart from traditional customer relationship management platforms in some fundamental ways, its developers say.
For one thing, MemberTRAK doesn’t include many of the detailed analytics, such as those aimed at assessing profitability of a customer to an institution, included in a typical CRM system.
That allows for a lean deploy that costs far less than most CRM systems, according to one of its first users. And it raises the bar for a key component of providing service to the end-user.
“We wanted to solve a very basic problem. If you call your credit union and you talk to someone about a situation, and then you call back later, you often have to start over with the next person,” said John Best, chief technology officer at WRG, a tech CUSO of the $3.2 billion Wescom Credit Union in Pasadena, Calif.
“All too often, there wouldn’t be any remnants of that initial contact, or at least not a good one,” he said. “We wanted to change this. We wanted to be proactive rather than reactive in problem resolution.”
Accountability for resolution, in fact, can be configured in MemberTRAK to extend all the way to the CEO if necessary, a setting already in place at one of its first user, the $733 million Capital Communications FCU in Albany, N.Y.
Rob Roemer, the 72,000-member credit union’s vice president of information systems, said about 60 staffers are using the system there, including “any department that has first-hand interaction with the membership.”
He said the July 1 rollout followed a few months of in-house testing and tailoring of the solution beyond exhaustive follow up to member-initiated contact.
“One thing we did was customize it so now when any new account is opened, we have as part of the onboarding process a requirement for one week, one month and annual follow-ups so the representative who opened the account can be sure that members are not left out in the dark about all the products and services we have to offer,” Roemer said.
MemberTRAK is the first CRM-type software that Capital Communications FCU has used and Roemer said its streamlined functionality was one of the major appeals,
“If you go out and look at all those CRM solutions out there, you may be intimidated by all the features they have to offer. This one is very focused and it’s not overwhelming for a branch representative to have to navigate,” he said.
“And from an infrastructure standpoint, it’s pretty similar to other third-party applications that tie into our Symitar system with its SQL back-end and Web-type front end,” the credit union vice president said. “So from a technology standpoint, it was something very familiar to us.”
That was no accident, of course. WRG developed the system in-house at Wescom, where it’s been used for several years, and the CUSO already provides a couple hundred credit unions with software solutions designed specifically for the Symitar Episys host platform.
MemberTRAK’s integration strength lies in the fact that it runs parallel with the Symitar host system, supporting real-time data access from the end user’s desktop, WRG said. And using the Episys system as the primary database avoids duplication of data into separate systems.
Also, third-party systems are shown in a single window, the CUSO said, and detailed workflow automation scripts have been avoided in favor of “simple, user-driven reminders that are easy to view, update and close out,” WRG said.
Best, the technology officer at WRG, said MemberTRAK was designed to integrate with, “not basically displace the host interface, which most CRM solutions want to do, and we didn’t want to bog users down with a lot of functionality they do not and may never need.”
The credit union philosophy also came into play.
“We approached this from an MRM perspective,” Best said. “A lot of CRM products will do analysis on each customer and look at profitability, a factor that can be conflicting with what you want to do to be that member’s [primary financial institution].”
“We believe that engagement correlates to happy members and then that becomes profitability. That’s what we’re trying to bring to the front with MemberTRAK,” he said.
At Capital Communications FCU, fine-tuning of the launch continues. For instance, “we hope to be able to reconfigure our phone system. We really don’t know what type of calls we’re getting in, beyond generically knowing the topic–such as loans or shares,” Roemer said. “We want to be able to dig down and say 75% of our calls this week were about online banking.”
“We have a hunch, of course, but we don’t have the data right now to get that granular. We want to work on that,” he said.
And as for that bottom-line metric, return on investment, Roemer said, “We don’t have an ROI on it right now, but I can tell you from a price perspective, that compared to other CRM systems, this was about a quarter of the price.”
Looking ahead, Capital Communications and WRG plan to add some more key information to the member-centric picture from the MemberTRAK solution.
“We’ve already started talking about some things for phase two,” Roemer said. “One would be integrating the STAR system for ATMs and credit cards. We hope to be able to tie in the information from that, and so our call center would have the entire picture.”
“This is 2009,” said Best. “If I call into a call center, it should not surprise me that the institution would know that I had also just been into a branch. That would have been freaky to me several years ago but not now."