RYE, N.Y.-USAlliance FCU has grown loans with increased cross- sales since launching the Micronotes Cross-Sell solution, which one person is calling "a Swiss Army knife" for gathering member data.
CEO Kris Van Beek explained that prior to launching the offering it lacked an online cross-sales solution, and in-person cross-sales were limited.
"You could call that cross-selling, but that was about the best we were doing unless you called the call center or came into a branch," said Van Beek, CEO at the $828-million CU.
The Micronotes system, which Van Beek first saw at the FInovate conference, launched in February and uses member data to formulate brief interview questions that pop up during online banking sessions, such as "Are you paying too much for your car loan?" It also queries about the member's current interest rate on loans. If the member indicates a level of interest, the user can elect one of several response options, including calling the CU, having a CU rep call the member, having information sent via e-mail or moving directly to an application.
During its first month-long campaign with Micronotes, USAlliance "interviewed" 15% of its online banking population (from a target audience of nearly 12,000 users), and generated about 1,100 qualified leads (about a 50% conversion rate). Of those leads, 8% were converted to sales.
Van Beek said USAlliance has seen positive results utilizing Micronotes to spur loans, and has also helped raise awareness of its mortgage offerings. "A mortgage isn't always a straight-forward product, but the initial conversation is," said Van Beek.
Micronotes can be stocked with proprietary data that CUs have on their members, including transaction data, but USAlliance has so far held off on digging too deep. For now, said Van Beek, "we wanted to test the waters and see how far we wanted to go with this." It is considering developing logic based around member transactions in billpay and cards.
Van Beek declined to discuss how much Micronotes is costing USAlliance, but said that the service is structured as a monthly subscription that includes a certain number of campaigns each month, which Micronotes helpes to build. "To me the whole success of this is making it easy-click yes, click no, a text block with 10 characters to put in a phone number," said Van Beek. "It's really so easy that the members don't mind clicking. ... I see it as a kind of Swiss Army knife. The real value is the data and coming up with that Amazon-like offer."
