It takes a community to maximize your core

Much like the customers of big brand banks, who often feel alone and unwanted, we often hear stories all the time about customers of big name, big box core processors who feel like Tom Hanks in Castaway: stranded and all alone on an island. A major factor in their feeling abandoned is that many of these large core processor companies provide no “community” for customers to rely on for support.

Your core system is the lifeblood of your credit union. It manages every single member transaction, is at the heart of every member relationship you have, and is also one of your credit union’s largest investments. But it’s also a very complex system, and can be a real challenge to figure out on your own. That’s where the value of a “community” comes in. You only strengthen your core (and peace of mind) when you have a reliable community that helps you:

• Connect to and collaborate with other credit union peers on your platform in user groups.
• Access content with a rich knowledgebase and training videos.
• Find standardized answers to efficiently answer inquiries.
• Rate and comment on content, tightly link case.
• Solve issues that other users have experienced by accessing the solutions in a knowledge base.
• Access training videos and documentation in an on-demand fashion.
• Get 24/7 access to submit ideas, access knowledge, submit cases to agents and see progress of those issues.

While online communities are a valuable tool, it’s important to remember that customers also want the ability to be able to navigate between channels (phone, email and online community) to get the appropriate level of service. Your core provider should provide those levels of service and personalized service.  For instance, at EPL our phone channel is still the primary communication channel used, but it is quickly followed in popularity by our self-service channels.  Our customers are asking for this and we want to provide a collaborative community of engagement—and answers! Also, we know many of our customers are on the go so we are working to go mobile with our support channel in the next few months.

We’ve seen increased adoption of collaboration since we started our e3 Community Support online channel last year. (e3 stands for Extension, Exploration, Evolution.) Trends we are seeing within the community include: greater adoption of customer service and idea submission for our software which helps increase our agent productivity and customer satisfaction. Also, as a result, we have better agent-to-agent collaboration by breaking down structures in favor for a more collaborative environment with subject-matter experts to increase first-contact resolution rates. We are ensuring that collaboration and customer service is becoming a corporate mindset for EPL.

As a cooperative, we know the value of community, and you can expect EPL to adopt best practices in knowledge management to make locating the right content or people easier vs. leaving you stranded on a remote island with nothing but a volley ball to talk to. At EPL, e3 stands for:  Extension * Exploration * Evolution (e3).  To learn more about the e3 Community Support program, click here

Rhiannon Stone

VP, Solutions Delivery

EPL, Inc.