By Frank J. Diekmann
If you’re a masochist and are looking to ruin a good conversation at the hotel bar one evening during the league meeting, ask someone about their credit union’s app.
Now start tossing back your beer, because the question will either elicit frustration over what the app cost and how it still isn’t delivering the “experience” members expect, or you’ll get a sermon from a zealot about all the products, services and functionality jammed into the CU’s app (although you’ll probably also get an earful about the cost, too).
With your beer finished, then ask, “But where is the ‘credit union’ in your credit union app?” and order another round. You’re going to get everything from the kind of blank stare you get when people want to tell you they think you’re an idiot, to a mumbled “It’s in there somewhere” to a pretty straightforward “That doesn’t really matter.”
But it does, says one expert, because it gets to the core of why any business exists. That was just one observation from a very good session on the evolving role of technology and marketing during the recent annual meeting of the CUNA Marketing and Business Development Council.
The panel discussion included Andrea Parrish, digital marketing specialist with STCU in Spokane, Wash.; James Robert Lay, CEO of Digital Growth Institute in Houston, and Madhukar Kumar, VP of product strategy with Oracle in Redwood City, Calif. You can read more about it here.
But among some of the very insightful observations offered were these:
Kumar. If you step back and think about it, why does a business exist? In credit unions’ case, it’s because of our members. Your primary goal should really be around creating a member and keeping a member…Everything that can be an app is an app now. Everything that can be done to increase efficiencies has happened. There is a huge commoditization of functionality. You have what everyone else has. What really differentiates you is the relationships you have with your members. Now you can go beyond the narrow definition of marketing to something more, which is engagement in the relationship.
Lay: Google has commoditized financial services. No longer can we compete on just great rates. The way I look at using tech to differentiate is extremely simplified: Help first, sell second. People want a trusted guide, someone to get them beyond the financial stress that is taking its toll, someone to guide them to a better place in the future. Technology is just the means for doing this. This goes to our purpose of why do we exist as a credit union. And that is still rooted in that motto of People Helping People.
Kumar: Every time we have seen a technology disruption happen it has amplified human capacity.
In each shift it has taken progressively fewer and fewer years to go from one shift to the next. Now we are going from digital to intelligence. If it amplifies human capacity, we have to ask what do we do with it. How does it relate to the core of your organization? What are the other things you are doing today that can be automated and how can you use technology to find the right people at the right time to help them to their next stage?
Lay: We can be so future-focused we miss the opportunities in the present. People build careers around futurism. But I don’t live in that world. I look at what can we capture now. For marketing executives it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and that you’re being left behind. We look at the horizon, but instead of looking at the horizon against that, why don’t we measure our progress against what’s behind us, from where we came. If we keep looking ahead we’ll never arrive.
Parrish: This is about setting our own expectations, too, around technology. It’s about stepping up and setting an aspirational goal and what is it we actually expect from it.
How Could It Be Clearer?
Many credit union leaders likely had the same response to a question posed by a judge as part of a lawsuit against Northeast Credit Union in Portsmouth, N.H., over its overdraft services.
One of the counts in the suit–which the judge has OK’d for class action status–alleges NECU breached its “opt-in agreement” on overdraft services. The judge noted the agreement does not explain what is meant by the words, “When you do not have enough money in your account to cover a transaction.”
Hence, the “How could it be any clearer response?” from many.
In this case, at issue is the fact NECU did not use the words “available balance” in the contract, but instead used the phrases “enough money,” “insufficient funds” and “non-sufficient funds,” according to the court order. The judge wrote that NECU “has not shown that the only reasonable meaning” of the terms in the agreement is available balance.
So, you might want to check your own language.
Frank J. Diekmann is Cooperator in Chief at CUToday.info and can be reached at Frank@CUToday.info.