OTTUMWA, Iowa — Last year, Community 1st Credit Union wanted to find a way to increase the number of members who considered the CU their primary financial institution.
"One of our strengths has always been the ability to cross-sell to our membership, but gaining new members has been an opportunity of ours," said Jami Kaelin, the operations manager at the $505-million asset CU. "We needed help putting a strategic plan in place to grow our membership and checking account penetration."
So the 54,000-member credit union decided to adopt a vendor growth strategy and it increased retail checking members by more than 50%.
According to Kaelin, while the CU offered a number of checking account options, the choices were often deemed confusing to members as well as employees. It turned to Haberfeld Associates and its Member Acquisition & Growth Strategy.
"Growing PFI relationships is never a simple fix," said Haberfeld Vice President David Carlson. "It is not about just training, or just marketing or a fly-by-night product. It is about understanding everything that goes into attracting more PFI relationships and being committed to the investment it takes to make it happen."
Kaelin said the first step was simplify checking account options at Community 1st, which cut down on member-selection anxiety. Next, the CU launched a direct-mail strategy and incentive targeting campaign for members and non-members. Employees were given extra training to better field checking account-related questions.
"We started by offering thank-you gifts upon the opening of a checking account and the response was huge," he said. "There were times we had trouble keeping a stock of gifts in the branch because the response was much larger than we initially expected."
During this time period, Haberfeld secretly shopped in the CU's 16 branches and studied its call center operations. "It brought us valuable feedback and helped us focus our training on those locations that weren't comfortable talking about our checking account options," Kaelin added.
Since rolling out the new PFI platform, Community 1st CU's checking accounts opened between January to October 2013 to January to October 2014 increased from 4,117 to 6,305. During the same time period new memberships established jumped from 4,538 to 6,990. Business checking accounts went from 188 accounts opened in 2013 to 278 opened in 2014.
"Business accounts have always been tough for us, but to see this increase was a huge motivator. We had 749 referrals come in this year alone," said Kaelin. "And 973 of our current members also made the choice to switch over to one our new checking account products."
