SAGINAW, Mich. -
“We have been fully compensated for our costs for developing Member Relationship Management,” said Lynne Kindy, SVP-systems and support at Team One. “And we now have a product that meets about 95% of our cross-sales needs.”
The $256-million CU created the Member Relationship Management product between 2002 and 2005 as it ventured into a sales-based business culture, said Kindy. “We were looking for a way to track the staff’s success at sales.”
The CU’s core vendor of 17 years, AFTECH, offered a basic cross-sales product, she continued. “But we wanted a product that would capture all the information that we wanted to capture for OUR credit union in particular.”
In 2003, Team One decided to buy the basic AFTECH software and then “build what we envisioned on top of that base,” said Kindy. “Our IT supervisor was really good at extracting data from the core system and feeding it into the cross-sales software.”
As Kindy and Team One’s IT supervisor, Justin Schalk, and previous sales manager built Member Relationship Management over the next two years, they quickly realized that the credit union couldn’t afford to maintain the product, continued Kindy. “We didn’t want to dedicate the time to keep it up-to-date,” she said. “We knew we wanted to fine-tune it and then wash our hands of it. So it only made sense for us to approach AFTECH to strengthen what we had already started.”
AFTECH would be able to offer supplemental technical expertise, Kindy said. Indeed, Team One ended up making several trips to tweak the software in face-to-face meetings with AFTECH programmers. “That was invaluable,” she said. And AFTECH offered Team One a financial buffer: the client base of 63 other AFTECH credit unions that were also stepping into sales and wanted software that keeps tabs on leads and incentives.
So began the AFTECH Innovators Program, which allows a credit union or a partnership of credit unions to develop a specific solution or functionality, even if the product is not in the works at AFTECH. Once the software is live at the initiating credit unions, AFTECH then offers the solution to its client base. The “innovator” CUs get a cut of the sales towards their development costs.
“One of the reasons we were excited about Innovators is that, if your product has value to others, then you get your development costs back,” Kindy said.
Tucson Old Pueblo CU (TOPCU) in Arizona teamed up with AFTECH and another CU last year to develop Member Relationship Pricing, an enhanced version of the AFTECH pricing solution.
The software was four months in development, according to Randy Baldwin, CEO at $150-million TOPCU. “I was very impressed with the speed to market and the thoroughness of the program.”
Member Relationship Pricing allows members to combine both deposit and loan balances at the household level to earn rewards. Three additional credit unions are now using the solution, helping TOPCU to recoup about 75% of the software development costs, Baldwin said.
Team One has recouped all of its costs, Kindy said. “It took only four months to be fully compensated because a lot of credit unions are ready to get into the sales culture.”
Member Relationship Management may appeal to other CUs because of the Team One fingerprint, said Kindy.
“We put all these spins on the product to make it work the way we wanted a credit union cross-sales product to work,” she said. “And it’s mind-boggling what this product can do.”
For example, the software suggests when Team One might be able to offer members multiple accounts of the same product, such as auto loans. And the staff can “drive the sales process,” said Kindy. “They can look at reports of their prospects and acceptances and can be alerted as to when to follow-up.”
In turn, the software tells managers when a sales lead becomes a done deal, instead of relying on an employee to accurately report a closed sale, Kindy said. “That way, we can reward the employees when they’ve actually met their objectives.”
The AFTECH Innovators Program was a good way to go, good enough that Team One will continue collaborating with third parties to develop technology in the future, such as check fraud detection and call center platforms, she added.
FOR MORE RESOURCES
Read more about technology collaboration at cujournal.com and search the following bolded terms in the archive:
CUs Find Investment In Tech CUSO Allows Them To Offer More Input
Increasingly CUSOs Are Being Used To Provide Variety Of Technology Solutions
CUs Slash Costs By Banding Together, Sharing Software
For more info on this story:
* www.teamonecu.org
* www.aftech.com
