Thing 5 of 30: Thank your members (often)

September is 30 things I would implement or consider implementing at my credit union if I was a credit union leader.

Thing 5: thank your members (often)

How often do your staff members reach out and say thank you to your members? Not in mass-printed form like a newsletter, annual report or member satisfaction survey, I am talking about deliberate personal interactions just to say thanks for dealing with your credit union. This could be in the form of an e-mail, a phone call, a card or even in branch.

If your credit union is anything like the one I have been dealing with for the past decade, the answer would be never. This isn't the only reason I am right in the middle of moving my entire personal and business relationship to another credit union, but it did play a part in the decision.

I received a thank you card in the mail last week from the general manager of our new credit union. It made my day.

Maintaining a personal relationship with credit union members is only going to get harder. With the convenience of online banking and debit and credit cards, members rarely come into the branch anymore. If I was a credit union leader, I would head to the stationery store or the local printer and order a bunch of blank cards, give every staff member a big stack and encourage them to write at least one thank you note to a member every day.

Saying thank you is easy. Do it often.

Tim

We should be eating humble pie as well!

The current post on Open Source CU is entitled Humble Pie from Credit Unions of BC. It is about Credit Union Central of BC's marketing website www.creditunionsofbc.com and how Paula, who has a personal blog, was put through a major run-around by following the ATM map directions that this site served up.

The class that was displayed by Alanna Malanchuk at Credit Union Central of BC was awesome. She promptly responded professionally by e-mail and then went a step further and sent a pie to Paula from the Acme Humble Pie Company. I am not surprised, as we deal with Alanna as a client and she, and her boss Martin Reid, from CUCBC are first-class folks.

Well, what hasn't come to light is that this was our fault. We built the site with our technology partners at K1 and used Google's original API that allows mapping to be integrated directly into websites.

What we didn't realize at the time was that some of the ATM locations in this vast nationwide network were inaccurate. Since all of this has come to light, Andrew at K1 has updated the code and reimported the Exchange ATM database. The new API code now plots locations based on address, postal code and GPS coordinates and should be much better now.

Communication on the social web is such a dynamic, ever-changing animal and this experience proves that everyone has a voice and is using it these days. It also proves that your organization's true worth is proven with how well you recover in tough situations.

Tim