ROCKVILLE, Md. -
"A promotion is only as good as the support of the staff," said Kristi Mathey, director of marketing for the $440-milllion credit union. "You have to believe in it and use it if you're going to sell it. Training is important, but a one-time training session isn't enough. If they learn to use it themselves and see how easy it is, they are much more likely to be enthusiastic-and successful-about showing it to members."
To that end, MCTFCU held a drawing for its employees in which employees were automatically entered every time they paid a bill using the credit union's online bill payment service.
Prizes included two tickets for dinner on the Spirit of Washington dinner cruise ship, two tickets to a Nationals baseball game and two tickets to the movies plus refreshments.
MCTFCU has a regular e-mail communiqué to employees called "The Buzz" and used that to not only tell staff about the promotion but also to show employees the tracking data on how many people were using the bill pay product. Just as Mathey and the rest of the management team had hoped, once the employees were comfortable using the system themselves, they were more than ready to help members learn how to use it, as well.
"We kept hearing how easy it was to use the new version," Mathey related. "We had bill pay before, but the new version we launched with PSCU Financial Services puts all of the information you need on one screen, which just makes it so much easier to use."
The biggest hurdle, of course, is getting members to do the front-end work of registering the payees. The only way around that, Mathey said, is to actually show members how easy it is to do even that. "You have to show them. We tell them 'bring in a bill, and we'll get you all set up.' Once they see how easy it was to get that one bill set up, they're much more likely to go home and set up the rest of them."
There was a special drawing for members, as well. Drawing winners received $1,000 in credits toward bills paid online in August. Most of the marketing was done via e-mail, and members were also invited to view a professional, contemporary online video promoting the program's ease of use that was furnished by PSCU for use on credit union web sites. The video's link to register for the service generated impressive results in the first 45 days, with 595 new subscribers earned out of 1,905 hits-a conversion rate of 31%.
The result: MCTFCU increased the number of bill payment subscribers among its employees by 125%, in turn boosting the number of member subscribers by 24% in just 45 days.
It's all part of an overall change in MCTFCU's approach to technology-based products and services. "We used to have a very reactive stance in the past. We'd wait to see how a given technology was working out somewhere else before implementing it here," Mathey explained. "Now we want to be more proactive. We've created an e-products manager position to really help us focus on this.
"I have just realized employees aren't as familiar with our online banking product as we'd like. It wasn't part of the new employee orientation," she continued. "So I think that's what I want us to focus on next as part of our new emphasis on e-services."
FOR MORE INFORMATION
www.mctfcu.org
www.pscufs.com
