WEST JORDAN, Utah - When the employees of Mountain America Credit Union (MACU) here are happy, members find it contagious.
“If employees are engaged, then there’s a real connection to members being loyal,” explained Marshall Paepke, vice president-human resources at the $2.6-billion credit union. That conclusion comes courtesy of research Mountain America Credit Union completed with Allegiance, Inc., a provider of hosted Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) solutions, which aim to improve both employee and member loyalty.
MACU employees may be the envy of the community, said Paepke. About 85% of the employees say they receive compliments from friends and family about the credit union, up from about 55% of the employees in 2002, when MACU first partnered with Allegiance.
Paepke attributes the success to MACU’s goal of becoming an “Employer of Choice.” Several new programs have had a “significant impact,” including “Bring Your Child to Work Day,” “Rivalry Week,” leadership courses, summer parties and charity and wellness events, said Paepke.
“Allegiance has definitely helped us measure our success,” he added. Overall, engagement has improved in the past five years: the majority of MACU’s high scores for are also the credit union’s most recent scores.
The Allegiance Employee Pulse survey elicits feedback about work stress, passion, productivity, engagement and turnover. The feedback helps the credit union gauge the emotional connection between MACU and its 950 employees, said Paepke.
After collecting feedback, senior management does something that may seem surprising–it reads the feedback word-for-word, said Brent Lawrence, SVP-public relations and public development at MACU.
For example, MACU found that employees didn’t understand the logic behind certain C-level policies, such as why competitors sometimes offer cheaper pricing, and thus weren’t able to explain the policies to members.
“Our employees have to understand why we do what we do so that they can communicate that to our members,” Lawrence said. “As a result, we’ve initiated a much more vigorous communication project.”
“We’ve improved the quality and content of our employee communication,” Paepke continued. Tools include employee newsletters, an Intranet, a weekly enterprise-wide e-mail–and, of course, Allegiance surveys.
It also has increased the number of ideas flowing in from the “think outside the box” employee-suggestion program.
“Some of the employee suggestions have saved us upwards of six figures,” he said.
This month, MACU will begin to use Allegiance MemberVoice to garner feedback from online members, said Lawrence.
“We want to determine member loyalty because it has such an impact on long-term results, but it’s getting tougher to get information from members by us contacting them via phone or e-mail because of ID theft,” explained Lawrence.
Allegiance gives online members a “comfortable way to have a voice and let us know what they need,” he said. Members can click to an online form from the homepage or the “Contact Us” page, categorize their comments, and direct messages to various credit union departments.
MACU may also use the Allegiance ActiveSurvey tool to determine whether members would recommend the credit union to their family and friends but also to find out why members defect, said Lawrence.
Allegiance does more than elicit feedback, added Chris Cottle, vice president-corporate marketing for the Salt Lake City-based EFM firm.
“From the feedback, Allegiance produces an engagement index to reveal the drivers of that engagement,” Cottle said. “It can also deliver predictive analytics, such as why a member intends to leave. That gives you a lot of information to act on.”
Paepke agreed: “I’d be chasing my tail if Allegiance didn’t provide the drivers of engagement, and all I had was the feedback itself.”
Soon, MACU hopes to capture member comments at the physical branch, combine them with online comments, segment the data, feed it into the Allegiance dashboard interface, and distribute the dashboard to branch managers.
“That will help managers stay enthused about extending a unique experience to our members,” said Lawrence.
MORE
Read more about EFM at cujournal.com and search the following bolded terms in the archive:
Making ‘Contact Us’ Count: How One CU
Can’t Get No Satisfaction Enterprise Feedback Management
For info on this story:
* www.macu.com
* www.allegiance.com
