Ink on the Interview
Q: Share with me maybe a couple of highlights from the conference so far that stood out for you.
A: Sure. So, first off, I think Eltropy always does a great conference. I really enjoy coming here. This is my second Emerge and then I did their leadership summit last year as well. They always just put a really good collaborative event together. I think one of my big takeaways from this conference is just how simple some of these things can be, you know, like particularly on the AI front, you know, we’re working and I think like everybody trying to figure out, okay, how do we use AI? What do we need? You know, what kind of governance do we need? What kind of things do we want to do? And it just occurred to me, you know, during one of the sessions here that, you know, this doesn’t have to be like a six-month committee type of thing. This is, you know, let’s take a couple of days to figure out some policy and some governance procedures and then turn CoPilot on for everybody and let the employees decide how we’re going to use it, you know, as long as they’re staying within that framework that we’ve set up, you know, we can drive that creativity from the ground up and have a swell of it rather than, you know, a top-down approach where we, you know, take a lot more time and, you know, really try and facilitate things. Because I know for a fact that I’ve got lots of people using it, you know, on their phones or on their personal laptops to accomplish things for work. They just don’t have access to it at work yet, right? That was kind of a big aha that, you know what, we can get everybody access like this week if we spend a little bit of time.
Q: So how are you guys working with Eltropy? Can you share what products you’re using?
A: Yeah, so we are currently using Texting. We’re relatively new, rolled out in December. Using it in I mean, collections, we’re using it in consumer lending, we’ve integrated with Meridian Link, we’re using it in mortgage, we’ve integrated that with our Encompass product, using it in our virtual branch and our contact center for texting specifically. And it’s been great. We actually are just working on an addendum to get numbers or text-enabled numbers for each of our branches, so we’ll have a specific number for each of our branches and let them be texting. These branches do a lot of consumer lending in our model, and once they kind of got their hands on it for the consumer lending side, they all said, we want one. So we were just adding that.
Q: Why did you guys venture down the texting road and use it in so many areas of your credit union? What was the reason behind all that?
A: Well, I mean, first off, nobody uses their phone for phone calls anymore, right? Nobody answers the phone. So I drive the roadmap for the credit union. And so kind of everybody comes to me when they want something or have an idea. And then I kind of vet it and patch, get it up, and sell it, and get it all approved and queued up. So a couple of years ago, I was talking to Algebra because they had reached out. And I kind of had my vision of where we might be going. And we were very early on in that relationship, and I had probably four different departments. Have you heard of Eltropy? Like, within about a month of each other. Oh, really? Wow, good timing. And they’re all, you know, like collections, like, have you ever heard of Eltropy? We really would like to, and Consumer Lending, have you ever heard of Eltropy? I’m like, funny, you shouldn’t mention that. Yeah, I’m talking to them right now. So, just trying to drive efficiencies and speeds and just connection, you know, with our members. On the collections side, obviously, you know, it’s made a huge difference and there’s an amazing cost savings because the old way is, you know, people on the phones that were, you know, nobody’s answering, so it’s 10, 12 phone calls before you finally get to talk to somebody versus, you know, one or two texts and they’re responding. There’s something about texting, consumer behavior, that they’ll be on it with a text, but not so much a phone. I’m on a one-man mission to drag our lending turn time down firmly where it should be minutes to an approval and minutes to funding or maybe an hour or two to funding for most consumer loans. And we’ve got to get there. And one of the big hangups at Golden West was response. We needed another little piece of information. We needed another piece of documentation. And we get in this kind of back-and-forth waiting on the member. And again, with texting, you text them, and they can shoot their documents back, or they can get you the answer back. And it just has really cut down our turn times. I mean, not to where I want them to be, but it’s cut them considerably from where they were. So we’ll keep working on that and keep iterating through that. So that was the other kind of really big thing that I was excited about. But, I mean, we have a vision for using the full unified platform. My other plan is, you know, like all of our communications in one spot. You know, we can build an integration from our CRM that will link to all of the chat history, text history, voice history, and then some of the AI tools with member-facing and employee-facing AI tools. So I think they actually showed a slide here yesterday that was channel communications, like all unified, and then you layer on top of that the AI, and then you layer on top of that analytics. And I’m going to sue them because I built that model a couple of years ago when I was selling this to my executive team, like a year ago. I’m not going to sue them. He’s like, well, sheesh, wait a minute. I know where you guys got this from. I’m sure they came up with it on their own, but great minds think alike. But that’s kind of my vision for it as well.
Q: So, where do you guys go from here, working with Eltropy?
A: Because texting is already a super big success in so many areas of your career. So we’re going to grow texting. We are also in the process of implementing the Employee assist. We’re kind of pushing Eltropy on that because we are a little progressive on that front. I guess we don’t actually have documentation for policies and procedures that’s in the form of documents. Ours is all already online and an intranet. And so with their employee assist, they’ve actually never connected to an intranet. And so it should work great, because they get great results from reading our website. So you think, in theory, it’s adjacency, right? So just getting that established, and then we’ll be testing and rolling out the employee assist. And then I think the next phase is member-facing chatbot, hostbot analytics, we want to do quality control and kind of voice of the member through them, get sentiment analysis, and all those sorts of things. These guys are on a fun path.
