OLYMPIA, Wash.-TwinStar CU here holds employees responsible for their loan sales and service. But that can be a problem if you can't get accurate, comprehensive data about each employee's performance.
All employees with the capacity to generate revenue get paid based on their monthly sales and service performance tier, explained Jerrod Keller, director, retail sales, at the $750-million CU.
Four years ago, TwinStar had trouble getting good data to support it sales plan, Keller continued. Some key data couldn't be exported from the credit union's core system.
"We were pigeon-holed into using certain amounts of data," he said. "We paid employees to produce several horrendous Microsoft Excel reports from the core and then do the mathematical analysis to produce a sales plan." In the end, the accuracy of the analysis could not be guaranteed, he added.
The results were "very basic and served a simple purpose," Keller said. "As our need to be more complex and strategic grew, so did our toolbox."
TwinStar discovered a report analytics platform that can convert mainframe greenbar reports, enterprise resource planning reports and PDFs into web-based reports that display data in line charts and bar graphs.
The platform, Monarch, is provided by Chelmsford, Mass.-based Datawatch.
"The core value of Monarch is that we can get so much data in one place that we'd normally have to pull from 10 different places into Excel," said Keller.
Monarch delivers multiple metrics aggregated from multiple resources-including the core processing, mortgage lending and MCIF systems-at the regional, branch and individual sales level, he said.
Real Time Data Validation
Monarch's ODBC interface standard allows TwinStar to "easily" get real-time and historical data-and validate it-from any of the target databases, he said.
TwinStar now develops and tracks nearly 30 "robust" sales plans by considering a host of metrics, including booked sales percentages, account applications taken, referrals, annual production, last year's sales versus benchmark years, and branch profitability. The CU can track how many members have purchased each product, and how the seasons affect penetration-"anything indicative of sales performance," Keller said.
Balancing the sales metrics are service metrics, with members randomly chosen to participate in online satisfaction surveys. Goal is a 90% satisfaction rating per staffer.
The sales plans guide about 40% of TwinStar's workforce. Employees can view monthly performance on the intranet.
Individual sales performance reports always "expose performance deficiencies, which we try to repair with sales training," said Keller. "If we're only closing half of the loans we approved, we might lead a sales seminar on how to close the deal or remove obstacles."
To a lesser degree, TwinStar employs Monarch analytics for collections, strategic planning, operations, accounting and administration.
