By Mike Mohr
Credit union managers and CEOs need information to help them improve, to grow their membership and to provide better, leaner products and services.
Unfortunately, they may not always have the information they need to help them make effective decisions. They may have a robust understanding of their business environment and clear vision of organizational direction, but a paucity of useful information, an information gap, will prevent them from reaching company goals and fulfilling their mission. It is critical that credit union leadership recognize that this gap exists, even if they are unsure of the ways and means to get the information they need.
Over the last dozen years business leaders have increasingly turned to rigorous scientific methods to help them overcome these information gaps. Advanced statistical analysis techniques performed by experienced business analysts are yielding insightful information that ensures decision-makers have the resources they need to lead their company to success. Powerful hardware, software and analytical methodologies, known as “data analytics,” are helping to bridge the information gap by systematically searching for relationships among business data in a logical and technically valid manner. Today, using the information gained from employing data analytics is the difference between a surviving business and a thriving business.
Credit unions have access to a wealth of data about their membership. Because of this wealth of data, the types of products and services that members’ desire should never have to be subject to an educated guess. A skilled service organization with professional business intelligence analysts using data analytics tools and expertise can transform those data into useful information that ultimately serves both the credit union and its membership.
What Members Are Telling You
Every day members tell you what they want through their transactional data. They tell you the extent and degree of effectiveness of your marketing efforts. They tell you of the utility of your website. They tell you what investment products they want, what types of loans they want, what services they need. They explicitly tell you what they want from their relationship with you. Data analytics and business intelligence are the tools that help you glean this information from the transactional data.
Learning to trust what the data is saying and to use that information to make sound business decisions will require a different effort and a new way of thinking that someone who has spent their professional lives successfully developing a smart business sense may find challenging, but you can do it. Starting today, you can use analytics to bridge the information gap and help improve your credit union profile. Decisions regarding which products and services to offer and to which members or how to best grow your membership can be made with a high degree of accuracy and precision when they are informed by your own member data. In the next part of this article, we’ll explore some specific ways analytics can elevate your credit union through data-based decision-making processes.
Mike Mohr is a business intelligence analyst with United Solutions Company, a Tallahassee, Fla.-based CUSO that provides a comprehensive menu of services to more than 85 credit unions, Credit Union Shared Service Centers, and the City of Tallahassee's Utilities Payment Centers. For info: www.unitedsolutions.coop.