What Credit Unions need to know about building loyal communities?

[JasonBrown]

Some businesses seem to hit it out of the ballpark the moment they open their gates. They seem to manage to go from 0 to 100 in the blink of an eye, and to many their success is a mystery. However, if you take a closer look, you’ll find that those brands that skyrocket to the top find a way to build a group of extremely passionate and loyal followers. Loyalty is a critical ingredient for a successful business as it has a ripple effect – it lowers customer churn, acquisition rates, and improves customer lifetime value.

And this doesn’t apply just for retailers. In fact, credit unions can benefit even more from building loyal communities because the whole ideology behind these institutions is a community of people helping each other out. That’s also why credit unions have members and not customers.

So, how do you build a loyal community? What changes do you need to make internally in your Credit Union to engender that kind of loyalty?
Here are a few ideas.

1. Adopt a Member-First Culture
The Member is King. Not only is this a perfect analogy to ‘The Customer is King’ but also makes complete sense today. You need to treat your members with great care, deliver amazing member experiences and engage with them passionately. You need to make them fall in love with your credit union so much they’d never want to switch to another financial organization.

Engendering that kind of loyalty starts with building human relationships. A person will go out of his or her way to do shopping at a store where they have gotten to know the sales person, for example. A simple relationship like that where they exchange pleasantries forms the stepping stones to greater customer loyalty.

However, to get to that point, you have to start by reorienting your organization’s focus around the member. For every decision you take, ask yourself ‘how is this benefiting my community and my members?‘ ‘is there a better way to do this?’. Member obsession is a must!

2. Empower Your Staff to Build Relationships
If you want to build a loyal community, you need to make sure your staff understand that they can go out of their way – within reason, of course — to make members happy.

For example, not long ago, it wasn’t unusual for an employee to be chided for spending too much time chatting about personal things with a customer. Nowadays, many companies want employees to talk to customers and build relationships. Because hey, the experience trumps everything else!

When your members greet your staff by their first name and ask about their dog, while your employee asks about your member’s kids, that’s when you can say you have a real relationship.

Credit unions need to action steps that will empower employees to actually engage freely with members and build a rapport. This is something the top management needs to commit to and ensure that it is implemented as a practice at the frontline level.

3. Hire the Right Kind of Staff
Of course, it’s also about having the right member-facing staff. Members will know if and when your staff isn’t genuine. They need to feel passionate about your culture, your values and the products and services you offer. Only then does the whole building-strong-member-relationships ideology work.

Is your staff empathetic and kind? How do they initiate conversations and handle frustrated and angry members? What kind of words do they use while conversing with members? Your frontline can often be the difference between a great and mediocre member experience.

4. Be About the Community
If you want to successfully build a community, then you need to show your members that you are focused on doing just that. Studies show that people “like” credit unions and community banks more than national chains. This is in large part because people like having a relationship with their financial institution – one that goes far beyond the impersonal interaction they usually have in large banks.

So, to build a community, you need to act like you are part of the community. Instead of focusing on nation-wide marketing campaigns, you would reap far greater benefits by participating in community initiatives where your branches are located.