Let's chat: How new tech platforms are changing office communication

This story is the final piece in a special report on credit unions and social media. The first two articles can be found here and here.

Email and voicemail aren’t going away anytime soon, but some credit unions and other industry organizations are embracing instant messaging platforms as their preferred method of interoffice communication.

That’s particularly true among institutions that are higher on the asset scale, including those with a large branch network or operating in multiple states.

Such is the case with United Federal Credit Union, a $2.7 billion-asset institution based in St. Joseph, Mich., with 650 employees spread across six states and three time zones.

"We are able to connect Michigan to Arkansas or Nevada to North Carolina in ways that allow for cross-departmental collaboration that elevates our problem-solving ability and expands our innovation efforts beyond the corporate office,” said Erin Hennessy, chief innovation and marketing officer.

Along with more traditional channels, United uses Cisco’s Jabber platform for instant messaging and screen-sharing tools.

The desire for real-time conversations drove Pentagon Federal Credit Union to utilize Ryver, another officewide communication system that includes not just messaging but video-chat functionality similar to Skype.

Brandon Harris, AVP of digital and innovations at PenFed

Brandon Harris, AVP of digital and innovations at the $24 billion-asset institution, predicted more and more credit unions will likely turn to tools like Ryver, Jabber and others as they seek to become more efficient, but that the movement’s overall usage will likely pale compared to other industries – particularly the tech sector, he noted.

“In the credit union industry, I would imagine it’s probably not that high,” Harris said, attributing much of that reluctance to a reliance on the status quo.

Statistics on workplace instant messaging usage are hard to come by, in part because of the wide variety of platforms and functionalities, but a 2017 ReportLinker study showed 43% of respondents use instant messaging applications at work, though that figure jumps to 71% for the tech industry. American workers may also be lagging behind the rest of the world – as much as 62% of international workforces rely on these tools. In general, U.S.-based workers use these tools for about 28% of their workplace communications, though just 8% say they are the primary channel, compared to 50% for email.

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Despite its popularity as a video-chat service, some CUs also use Skype chat purposes, putting them in line with a reported 29% of companies. More than 20% of respondents also reported using Facebook Messenger as their primary tool, though that figure roughly doubles for organizations with 50 or fewer employees – in other words, the size of the vast majority of credit unions – where 41% say they use Messenger for on-the-job chatting.

LendKey, a fintech platform that partners with credit unions and community banks to source unsecured consumer loans, utilizes Slack as its go-to office-communication platform.

“Slack enables us to have resources spread across the world,” said Samir Suri, head of product at LendKey. “We can be anywhere and employees can stay in touch with what’s going on in [multiple] offices.

Samir Suri, head of product at LendKey

Which platform an organization uses may also depend heavily on the costs involved. Slack, for example, charges $15 per user, whereas Ryver bills institutions $1,188 annually for an unlimited amount of users. PenFed doesn’t see those costs, however, since the credit union is grandfathered into a free plan.

Sources said platforms like these help improve workplace communication while also providing an immediacy that tops email – with the added benefit that there are no cluttered inboxes.

But that doesn’t mean offices are giving up on email. One recent study from Fluent showed more than half of U.S. workers check their work email as it comes in or “many times a day” – including when they are out of the office – and just one-third of respondents said they don’t check email at all when out of the office.

Suri said using Slack also offers a less formal environment than email, particularly when praising employees.

“We not only use it for LendKey’s business," he said, "we use it to acknowledge certain milestones when certain team members went above and beyond.”

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