The past couple of years have been full of ups and downs in the labor market. 2020 brought a year of job insecurities, with unemployment hitting 14,8% in April of that year. 2021 rebounded in a big way, with that rate dropping to 4.8% by the end of that year respectively. Credit Unions have seen similar trends as well, but now face a new challenge; hiring for traditionally in-person jobs in a work-from-home, digitized age.
Although labor has stagnated, one thing that has been growing steadily are the Credit Unions themselves, with record industry earnings. Credit Unions are now facing record highs in Member counts, with an average of over 400 Members to employee ratio, the highest ratio seen in the past 1,000 years*. On top of this, Members are applying for more loans, making staff busier and more responsible than ever.
With the average Credit Union increasing compensation per employee by almost 10k since the beginning of this pandemic, upping the headcount to compensate for the influx of newer, more active Members, is no longer the smarter & more cost effective solution. Credit Unions must look to innovative technologies that allow their staff to work more efficiently and effectively, without compromising on the main goal: the Members and their experience.
Eltropy, the best and only omnichannel Digital communication platform to offer Video Banking, Text Messaging, Cobrowsing, Secure Chat, and Chatbot capabilities, is enabling our partners to get back to what matters most; serving their Members in the best and safest manner, all while enabling their staff to do more.
Lending
From sending an application to closing an approved loan and everything in between, lending happens faster and safer with Text Messaging.
Better lending starts with a better way of communicating. With Texting, communication with Members about every step of the loan process is simple and efficient for a number of reasons. While Text Messages themselves are insecure and unencrypted, Eltropy’s unique, secure & trackable links allow for secure document collection via Text messaging like never before. Messaging is done on a 1-to-1 scale, allowing for stronger communication and collaboration between Members and officers. These trackable links also come with actionable insights into the Member’s document loan journey, giving Financial Institution solid analytics on what works best for their Members on their unique journey. Text messaging also means faster response times from Members.
After implementing Eltropy, Advantage Plus Federal Credit Union saw their response time increase by 44x. Processes & documentation collection, which usually took days to complete, were now being completed in an average 33 minutes.
The ability to save time and streamline a typically headache inducing process empowers lending officers to work more efficiently and service more Members. This increased productivity comes at not only the benefit of the officer, who can now work to serve a higher number of Members, but the Members themselves, who can complete loan processes easier.
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Collection
Whether it’s early stages or late stages, Texting is the more efficient way to to collect
Much like with lending, strong and customized communication is essential for loss mitigation and avoiding delinquencies. Eltropy specializes in aiding collections, whether that be with early stages of a collection process or the later stages. In the early stage, Eltropy specializes with automated 1-to-many Texting & payment reminders. For late stage collections, Eltropy’s ability to go back to 1-to-1 Texting for personalized conversations allows officers to connect with Members and solve issues. In addition, Texting can be up to 40x more effective than phone calls for collections departments. Being able to connect one on one with a Member who’s struggling with collections and have unique dialogue allows for not only less delinquencies, but a higher level of customer service. These conversations make Members feel like they’re heard and felt, especially with COVID-19 financial hardships like never before.
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Contact Center
Add Digital customer service and communication to your traditional phone support to better service your Digital-first Members
With more and more of your Members using online banking instead of branch visits, telephone only support is probably not very productive for your agents and not that effective for your Members using online banking. Provide live help from your online banking site and allow your Members to communicate via chat, audio and video and use cobrowsing to visualize the online banking site for faster and higher quality customer service for Digital Members.
Texting is another great way to service your mobile Members. Members who are on the move all day can Text their questions instead of calling or coming into the branch and get their issues resolved in their free mobile movements. Once the Texting has started, you are one click away from your Members to get routine issues resolved.
Talking about routine issues, consider using chatbot to handle routine issues from Text and web. With a chat bot, you can provide “zero wait” service to your Members and at the same time free up your agents to handle more complex issues and focus on relationship building.
Finally, if you are seeing call overflows because of occasional events like holidays, weather, etc. use SMS to communicate with your Members and avoid the incoming calls for questions that can be proactively answered via SMS communication.
With Digital communication and Digital customer service, you can not only improve the productivity of your employees but at the same time better serve your Digital Members. Contact center, lending and collections are some of the use cases where a Digital communication platform can help with labour shortage and better Member service. Learn more about all the use cases of Digital communication platform
*Credit Unions have a staffing problem
