A couple weeks ago we listed our house. It sold in four days. The plan at the time was to find a new place and maybe downsize. After the sale a former colleague contacted me about a job opportunity. We talked, he made an offer. A couple days later, after much discussion with the family, I accepted.

So it’s with this post that I let you all know that I’m on the move again. This time back to Vancouver.

I’m joining the team at Central 1 Credit Union as Product Manager, Direct Banking. I’ll be overseeing their suite of MemberDirect banking products starting in March. Having worked in the credit union system for a big part of my career I’m excited about returning to my roots in banking and helping to shape Central 1′s products.

Over this past twenty-one months I’ve met a lot of great people here in Calgary, made some new friends, helped move UX forward a bit more (with Calgary UX), seen my son off to his first year of school and watched my wife blossom in her career. I’ve had a lot of wonderful opportunities to grow, learn and share and I’d like to thank everyone for that.

I also want to take this opportunity to thank the team at nForm. When I joined them back in 2009 I wasn’t expecting such a short ride. I’ve been truly fortunate to have worked with such a great group of people and will miss you all. Your support in this decision has been greatly appreciated.

Next stop: Vancouver is a post from: benry blog

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On one hand it’s flattering that people feel we’re (the royal ’we’ since I’m a team of one) doing some interesting stuff with our online channel and want to hear what we have going on. On the other hand though I’m growing tired of people just piggybacking off of or copying what we’re doing. We put a lot of effort we put into the design, interaction planning, usability and analytics and it is frustrating to see some of it simply re-done elsewhere.

That got me thinking about how Credit Unions (in particular those of us here in BC or Canada for that matter), could improve what we’re doing online.

Figure out who your customer is. Do you know? We do. And we spend a lot of time talking to them, we research the where, what, why, how and when. We capture them in detailed personas and constantly evaluate whether we’re meeting their needs online. We look for ways to improve, involve them in usability studies and try to make it easier for them to do business with us.

Determine what you want your online channel to be and what you need to get there. It seems that many people I speak with have no online strategy. No plans to get beyond faceless, boring brochure-ware. Few seem to be considerate of the fact that over 90% of product purchase decisions begin with an online search, or that people want to be able to open an account online. Fewer still are doing SEO/SEM, email marketing, web analytics or looking at how their customers/members engage with the online channel.

Look forward, stop standing in the same place. Credit Unions are notorious for this. We seem to be content with the same-old-same-old, don’t want to push the envelope and try new things (William with ChangeEverything, Coast Capital Savings with Julie and Gene with MemberNote are some recent exceptions).

Figure out where we can work together to advance something or cut costs. There are so many opportunities to work together. A simple example: credit unions on the MemberDirect Integrated platform all use similar tools (e.g. our find branch/ATM tool). We all hate it, want it changed, but rather than working together, some go off and build their own, spend countless hours applying band-aid changes to solve for existing problems or simply put up with what is there while we wait for our partners to finally find the time to fix it. IMHO we should be picking a few things we want to change each year, partnering to sort out the requirements and sharing the development costs.

Remember you are my competition. A couple years ago I coined a phrase I like to use to describe our credit union landscape — coop-etition. In my opinion it’s something none of us want to admit. We all need to remember that while we’re all friends and in this together as credit unions and should be working together as much as possible, we’re also direct competitors for the same customers, the same dollars, the same business. I’m taking a different path because I want to be different than you. Are you or are you just copying what I’m doing?

Get your own damn online strategy is a post from: benry blog

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The lowest employee on the organization chart has the great contact with the member. But why are they the least consulted when it comes to any change in process with the member?

Are we talking to the right people? is a post from: benry blog

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• login to your facebook account
• update your facebook status (NAME is) to read: looking at NSCU’s new 5.25% term deposit. $1000 min deposit, 18 month term. Offer ends Oct. 13. www.nscu.com/greatrate
• when your friends log into facebook they’ll all see this status update – like a free ad to your social network.

Another option as well is twitter. Here’s some do’s and don’t's for Twitter marketing.

Using twitter and facebook to get the message out is a post from: benry blog

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• Make it easier for people to complete key tasks
• Blend our personal and business offering (users were not self identifying with these self segments) and enable cross-sell to all sides of our service
• Enable us to continue to expand on the provision of a solutions-based, not product based approach to meeting member needs.

We modified the home page providing access to key tasks and introduced a compelling ‘widget’ as our primary communication area. The ease-of-use is remarkable and all available via one less click since we took out a whole level in the IA. The new section landing pages (Banking, etc.) we’re tweaked slightly as were the interior pages to provide more whitespace, better access to related links and reading. The contact us page even got a slight overhaul. Additionally, thanks to Dennis and his post about the length of your search query box — an optimized search query box.

I have a bunch more things I haven’t put live, so look for some surprises in the coming weeks.

Making our decisions based on the data (web analytics), rather than just gut is paying off. Over the past two years, incremental tweaks have reduced the reject rate on key pages substantially and overall site wide and continued refinements to the IA (information architecture) to elminate the number of clicks/steps required to complete tasks has visitors engaging with more content on the site.

A big thanks to Robbin Steif for listening and being full of opinion, Habanero for the IA, design and usability effort and the folks at CUCBC for pulling this all together.

Launch of the new North Shore Credit Union site is a post from: benry blog

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