For the third time in as many days I’ve had a call from one of my credit unions peers asking about what we’re doing online or planning to do online in 2008. When I get one of these calls or emails the sarcastic side of me wants to pop out and respond saying “maybe it’s time to get your own damn online strategy”.
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?
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