You’ll Forget All About Convenience With Products You Don’t Want
When it comes to attracting new members, it is crucial to understand that the process's speed and ease often hold a higher appeal than the actual products and services being offered. Potential members are looking for financial institutions that can provide them with smooth, hassle-free experiences. They want to be onboarded quickly and without any unnecessary complications, outweighing the value they see in your products and services.
In this episode of Grow Your Credit Union, hosts Joshua Barclay and Becky Reed welcome on Elizabeth Osborne the Chief Operations Officer of Great Lakes Credit Union to talk about how her credit union is adapting to these expectations and more.
This episodes topics:
Strategies for retaining and acquiring new members
Approaches to reduce Call Center turnover rates
Traits that hinder leadership effectiveness
Methods to mitigate cyber-attacks
The real fun starts whenever you press play. Alternatively, you can read the full transcript below.
Thanks to Silvur for sponsoring this episode
Silvur is the retirement engagement solution for Americans 50+. Leading credit unions use Silvur to retain direct deposit relationships lost at retirement (up to 80%) and reach 98% of members not served by wealth management. Support your 50+ members, reduce asset flight, and capture the $70T retirement wallet. Visit Silvur.com to learn more.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
[Joshua Barclay] In this episode, we're addressing strategies for acquiring new members, roadblocks that prevent leaders from achieving their full potential, and what credit unions should be doing to mitigate cyber attacks.
Welcome to Grow Your Credit Union. I am your host, Joshua Barclay, and I am with my co-host, the talk of Texas, Becky Reed. Becky, can I get a howdy, y'all?
[Becky Reed] Howdy y'all.
[Joshua Barclay] I want to start off this episode by sharing some good news. But first, I want to mention our sponsor, Silvur. That's Silvur with a “U”. For those who aren't in the know, Silvur is the retirement engagement solution for Americans ages 50 and up. Stick around to learn how Silvur can help your members plan for retirement later in the show.
Becky, let's get to the good news. This show is already doing extremely well, far beyond our initial expectations.
[Becky Reed] That is incredible. I am so thrilled and excited that the show has been downloaded by so many people and we have had a lot of people want to be guests, so that's really exciting too.
[Joshua Barclay] Very, very exciting. We want to thank the audience that has been listening to the show. We really appreciate it. And if you haven't already, follow us on your preferred podcast app and follow us on LinkedIn. We've got a LinkedIn page called Grow Your Credit Union. Give us a follow. All right, Becky, let's kick off the show.
I want to bring on our guest. With us today is the chief operations officer of Great Lakes Credit Union, Elizabeth Osborne. Elizabeth, welcome to the show.
[Elizabeth Osborne]
Thank you for having me.
Segment 1
[Joshua Barclay] In an article published on Globe Newswire, a study conducted by Charter states only a third of people worldwide are likely to advocate for or recommend a financial services company. And it goes on to say that 37 percent of respondents said they're likely to switch banks in the coming year.
Sounds to me like a lot of people are not satisfied with their respective financial institutions. So Becky, let me start with you. What strategies should credit unions have in place to both retain and acquire new members?
[Becky Reed] Well, Josh, it's a struggle. So, there's a book called Marketing 5.0. I recommend everybody read it. And what it talks about is there are five generations right now that companies have to market to. And credit unions are no different. So, that means we have to market to all the way from Gen Z, which are the latest on the scene, and potentially even the Alpha generation, right, that comes after them, because kids' accounts are a thing.
All the way to even the Silent generation, which are in their 80s and up. And I think that having that breadth of marketing is really, really challenging for credit unions. So, credit unions do well with about two of those segments. And, believe it or not, those are the older portion of the segments, the baby boomers.
I think credit unions do really well. Lots of people join credit unions in that particular generation. Gen X joined credit unions because their parents were members of credit unions, and now coming behind them, the Millennials, and not so much Gen Z, really not so much. And if we're getting to Gen Alpha, it's only because again, their parents, which are probably millennials, maybe you're a member of a credit union.
And so, that's really a challenge, and technology can help with this because there are lots of engagement tools that the younger generations are utilizing. Think about things like Discord. Think about things like Telegram. That the online communities are actually engaging with these generations and credit unions.
Don't really use those, uh, very often, but let's face it. Switching accounts is a pain. So, no wonder a lot of people don't recommend changing.
[Joshua Barclay] Becky, you know, you're mentioning, you know, marketing and messaging to multiple age demographics. And to me, this sounds more like a branding issue. I did an interview a while back with Ronaldo Hardy, the president, and CEO of NACUSO. And he said that if he could change one thing, he would call us financial cooperatives so that credit unions had the language that would resonate with the next generation.
You've also mentioned this on our show and how we aren't doing a great job marketing the CU difference. Let's move this over to you, Elizabeth. Do you agree with Becky's take?
[Elizabeth Osborne] I couldn't agree more. If we think about that, the pain and suffering of moving an account, right? Well, if you look at the neobanks out there like Chime, they have made it so easy, right? And this is where I think our biggest opportunity is with credit unions and with banks in general, is that we like to use flashy words like money market and CD.
Well, your Gen Y, your Gen Z, the groups that we're struggling with the most, they're like, "I don't know what that is, and I don't really care. I just need my money to go somewhere. Right. And they're like, "I need to pay someone or something, and I need to have the ability to access it easily on my phone." And so if you open an account with Chime, which I did recently because I wanted to show my team, I'm like, "This is our competitor.”
There's a reason why they've grown at such a crazy rapid pace is that they have completely simplified the process. There's no more, like, 'What kind of checking account do you want?' They're just like, 'Hey, you need an account. Okay, great, let's get your account open, you fund it.
Very simple, easy steps. It's extremely simplified. And then, after you open that account, which you don't know if it's checking, you don't really know what it is, you're just opening an account. Then, they're like, 'Hey, after some time, they're like, we noticed you have a little, like, you've got 50 extra bucks in your checking account every week.
We recommend you make money with your money. Let's move it over and get you started with a savings account.' And it's just this very fluid, almost like conversational banking approach that, frankly, credit unions and banks don't offer. We make it's a clunky process. The technology's not great. Some are much more advanced than others.
But it's a very different process and experience than what you'd find with the neobanks. And so I think that's our biggest opportunity. We recently introduced a new online account opening platform. And we tried our best to kind of mimic that simplified workflow, but unfortunately, we're held to different regs, right, and different, there's different risk considerations that we have to take because, as a financial institution, that make that process a little longer.
So we're like, 'Okay, let's keep it under five minutes, let's keep it simple,' and there's still work to do, but what we have now is light years ahead of what we had two months ago. So, we're getting there, but I do think that's the biggest challenge, and it scares the living bejesus out of me because if we keep at this rate, and look at our membership base, you know, I think our average member, definitely in the, I think in the upper 50s, okay, and even larger, later generations, well, as they kind of phase out, and if we don't have members to replace that, then we're a dying breed.
And that's a problem.
Segment 2
[Joshua Barclay] There are a lot of jobs that are not appreciated, and one of those is call center employees. This comes from a study published by the SQM Group a year ago, but the problem is still relevant today. And this study claims that the average call center turnover was 35 percent in 2021 and 38 percent in 2022.
So I want to start with you, Elizabeth, as a credit union leader. What do we have to do to better support our call agents and lower turnover in the industry?
[Elizabeth Osborne] Yeah. There's a lot we have to do. Um, and actually, I would say, on average, every other week, I'm speaking to a credit union recently about what we've done, which is not perfect, and we are not where we need to be. But we're trying our best to address it, is trying to slow down the burn.
And high turnover rates in the contact center by improving morale. And so, over the last year, we've worked really hard to improve our contact center. There are ebbs and flows. I'll tell you right now, we're on the downside, not the upside. We're three months ago, we're doing a lot better than we are now.
It is what it is. We got to address it. But I think it's really a few different pieces. One is we have to make sure that we are supporting our employees. You have to have the right people in the right seats. And if you don't have the right managers coaching and leading in the moment with that staff and feeling like they're supported, you're not going to be able to slow that down.
It's just, we expect so much out of these employees. They have to know how to support online banking. They need to help members who are challenged with opening an account. They're going to help them with closing out an account. They're going to help them through card fraud. I mean, it's a tremendous amount of knowledge.
It requires a ton of training. And so it's hard to get them trained up where they feel really positive and like they are feeling successful in their job. And then the question is, how do you retain them? You've got to keep morale up, keep them engaged, and make it fun at work. Have the options for remote work, which we're now able to do with the technology in place.
But I think all those pieces together, which is nothing life-shattering, nothing brand new, it's almost like you have to keep it simple to address it, but they need that focus. And you need both the executive and senior manager focus where they feel like they're being supported.
[Joshua Barclay] Becky, what do you think?
[Becky Reed] If you've ever worked in a call center, it is like the most terrible job ever, right? Those folks just get abused. And when people are upset, they will say things to you over the phone that they would never say to you in person. If somebody is frustrated or upset, which at a financial institution sometimes that happens because you have people's money, they call in the call center, they're frustrated, they're upset, and they just unload on the call center agent.
It's really a frustrating thing. I have actually witnessed call center employees get up, throw their headphones on the counter, and walk out the door crying. It is just a brutal job. So high turnover in a call center is not necessarily unique to credit unions, right? Call center employees, it's just a hard job overall.
Now, from a credit union perspective, when you are working in a call center, you have to kind of be the one-stop shop, and you have to know everything. And at Lone Star, we one time, we actually counted all of the products and services that we offer. And it was over a hundred. And a call center employee has to know all of the details about every single one.
Because somebody might call in and have a question about any number of those. They could have a question about five of those hundred. They could have a question about a hundred of those hundred. Oh, and by the way, we expect our call center employees to sell. Those hundred things to the member to be that doctor, right?
To be the respected and advisor, right? To the member. And so you kind of get all of that whenever you're a call center employee. So one of the things that I recommend is having a triage. Now, not every credit union can afford to do those things, but even if you have a five-person call center or even a three-person call center, you can triage.
The needs of the member to somebody who maybe is more experienced and perhaps you can even pass that call on to a non-call center employee that might be a subject matter expert in that area. So that's a way to help that you can bring on new people who don't necessarily have to memorize the dictionary before they can start their job.
Sponsor - Silvur
[Joshua Barclay] Hey, I want to take a moment to talk about this episode's sponsor, Silvur. Silvur is a retirement engagement solution for Americans over 50, the demographic that holds over 80 percent of US household wealth, and is the first generation to retire without the benefit of a pension. Silvur makes it easy to help them with over 800 classes, powerful calculators, and a proprietary retirement score to guide complex decisions along the 20 to 30-year retirement journey.
[Joshua Barclay] Silvur's always-on technology platform is designed to economically engage all of your members who are ages 50 and up, not just those served by wealth management. Silvur helps capture and retain direct deposit relationships and uncovers hundreds of millions in new deposit and wealth opportunities.
Support your most valuable member segment, reduce asset flight, and help your members retire fearlessly with Silvur. Learn more at Silvur.com.
Segment 3
[Joshua Barclay] On CUInsight, Lori Maddalena published an article titled "The Five Leadership Saboteurs." In it, she lists five challenges that prevent both new and tenured managers and executives from being influential and successful leaders. Number one, lack of self-awareness. Number two, lack of focus. Number three, lack of delegation.
Number four, lack of team engagement. And finally, number five, being conflict avoidant. Becky, from this list, which do you believe poses the greatest threat to the success of a credit union leader?
[Becky Reed] Well, all of these, Josh, are applicable to every leader in every organization, not just credit unions. But for me, as a leader, one of the things that I've found, both in myself and also what I see in others, is lack of self-awareness. And that is something that affects everybody, right?
If I'm not really aware of how what I'm doing is impacting other people, then maybe I'm not doing my best as a leader. So very early on in my career, I learned about the four behavior styles and I learned what behavior style I was. We all have our positives and negatives, right? There's a yin and a yang.
And when you get married, you often marry your polar opposite. So, you know, I am a super extrovert, outgoing person. My husband is more introverted and analytical. And that's really great when you're serving on a team. This also relates to being a leader. You need to have diverse perspectives and different people from different behavior styles contributing to make better decisions.
But what I learned is that my husband wasn't necessarily trying to be a pain, and neither was I. And so once we learned to respect each other's differences, it made a huge difference in my life, both in my personal life as well as my professional life. And so once I started really kind of turning that inward and understanding more about myself and how what I might be doing is impacting how others could potentially behave, that really helped me on the path to self-awareness.
[Joshua Barclay] Are there any techniques that you use to try to help employees? Jedi mind trick? What do you think?
[Becky Reed] No, it's one of those things that you have to have maturity, I think, in order to start looking inside yourself and recognizing how the things that you do can trigger things in other people, whether that be positive or negative. And so for me, self-awareness can begin with coaching.
That's one of the things that I brought to Lone Star Credit Union. We studied the four behavior styles at Lone Star, and we learned how to communicate differently to different behavior styles. If you understand what makes you tick and you understand how your communication style can change a little bit to get the best out of the other person, then that's something that we should focus on.
So one of the things you can do with anybody, coworkers, a spouse, is you can just say, "Hey, can I give you some feedback? That thing that you just did made me feel this way." And that can start to get people to recognize that their choices with how they speak, how they behave, are actually impacting the reactions of other people.
[Joshua Barclay] Elizabeth, what's your take?
[Elizabeth Osborne] Yeah, so, lack of self-awareness was number one by far. Completely agree with that. You know, it's, I found that as a leader, I've been most successful when I've adjusted my style to the person, not expecting that they adjust it to me. And so it's hard though. It's really hard when you have big teams because you're trying to get the most information you can to get support wherever you can for each individual, but each business is so different that their needs are different.
I've created a general template that we use for our one-on-ones, because I find the one-on-one meetings so valuable. That's where we get to connect and talk through things, and we try to add some personal stuff in there too, just so we get to know each other better because we're all very different.
But that's something that I really actively focus on because if you have a lack of self-awareness, you will not be successful as a manager, and you won't connect with your team like you really need to. And so, something I've also been helping my team with is trying to do the same thing for them. And so like when, let's say one of my direct reports is like, "Wow, I'm so frustrated, I can't get through to this person." I'm like, "Well, you guys are very different people, right?" Goes back to what Becky was saying, you're very different.
Have you approached it this way? Have you thought about asking the question differently, or inquiring, or starting a little differently next time, and then gauge your approach based on that? Sometimes, you know, it takes a while to get into that happy medium space with both parties, but it's an effort that you have to be conscious about.
The other was conflict avoidant, and this, I've been so shocked. This is the second C-level team I've worked on, and I've always worked with other executive leaders that really do everything they can to avoid conflict. And so something a boss of mine taught me back in my early career, when I was like 21, is she taught me something called the 24-hour rule.
And the 24-hour rule, she's like, "If someone says something to you, ticks you off, whatever. If you're still thinking about it 24 hours later, you've got to address it because that's going to impact your relationship with them and it's going to change the way you handle situations." And so, the way you approach it is not like "You ticked me off yesterday." You go up to that person, you say, "Hey, I wanted to follow up about the meeting we had yesterday, the conversation.
I have a lot of respect for you, but I didn't feel like you were showing me that same level of respect, and I never want that to happen again. Can we talk about it?" And nine times out of ten, people are like, "Holy moly, I am so sorry. I had no idea. I thank you for bringing it to my attention." And at the end of that, the individual respects you a whole lot more because you've addressed it.
So that is a huge opportunity with any leader across the organization. And I try to share that with my team too.
Segment 4
[Joshua Barclay] In light of recent ransomware attacks targeting the credit union sector, including a very significant incident with Trellence affecting 60 credit unions, the question becomes, how are credit unions adapting their cybersecurity strategies to address not only direct threats but also vulnerabilities associated with third-party vendors?
[Elizabeth Osborne]I'd say it is a learning process. I have found that in my banking days, when I oversaw technology, I was asked a lot more questions from regulators and auditors about how we, which type of controls and processes that we have in place to monitor and assess third-party relationships.
Because if you think about credit unions, banks, we're all very much the same. We are so reliant on third parties and the majority of contracts do not have the proper adequate protection to ensure that you're receiving the information you need to assess whether or not the security posture of your third party truly is going to meet your needs.
What are their response times in the event of an event? What level of information is required? And so I think there's a huge gap there and opportunity. We are very focused on improving that here at Great Lakes Credit Union. And our third parties are fortunately very open to doing that with us. But it hasn't been as much of a focus.
So if you think about vendor management and that side of the house, which is, as we grow and we talk about technology, this whole podcast, we've talked a lot about technology. Every single one of those components requires typically nine times out of ten a partner. How do you know your partner is safe and that they're not going to have the ransomware attack?
And then if they do or when they do, because you will have a partner that has it at some point, how do you respond? So your BCP DR plan, are you testing it? Do you have the right people in place? Do you have templates? Do you have other third parties that help you work through that? It is a huge opportunity and I just felt terribly for those 60 credit unions.
And I was selfishly really glad I wasn't one of them.
[Joshua Barclay] And what does this do to trust erosion from members? Are there any lasting repercussions?
[Elizabeth Osborne] I think the average consumer is becoming somewhat immune, and so that is to our favor because if you think about, you think about some of the recent healthcare attacks, hospitals completely shut down, that's your medical information. You trust everything with your doctor. That's happening.
It's in the news. So, I do think there's a segment of the population that is just like, "It happens." Maybe I'm going to think twice before I put more money there or go there to see a doctor or whatever the case. But then the other piece is, you know, I think that it's how you communicate to really the small portion of your members that are going to call or they're going to come in and they're really upset and they're threatening to move.
So how do you tell your story about, because they don't know who your third party is and they don't frankly care. They just know that you failed and because of that, their information is at risk. Their data, their money's at risk. And so then it's all about, again, that response. How do you PR side of it.
How do you ensure that you're providing consistent messaging back to the members to help to hopefully build that trust back again?
[Joshua Barclay] Becky, let's kick it over to you. What's your take?
[Becky Reed] I'm going to turn the tables a little bit and I'm going to say that you can have all the controls in place, right? You can have the most secure network possible, which is a zero trust network, right? And that certainly helps from a cybersecurity perspective. But at the end of the day, the bad guys are attacking and targeting people because in any equation, right?
Machines and software and firewalls, they do a particular job. And honestly, those things are really, really difficult to hack. But people can be tricked. And that is where comes the challenge. I think if you look at all of the breaches that have happened, I mean, look at the Home Depot breach. Let's look at some of the big ones that have happened over the years.
It's usually because an employee, or a vendor, or someone that has access to sensitive data, clicks on a link in an email. That's it. Or answers the phone and someone says, "Hey, this is IT. I need access to your computer. I'm going to send you a link real quick. Can you click on it so that I can go ahead and make some changes to your desktop?" You can spend all the money in the world to try to harden your network, but people are always going to be the weakest link.
So I recommend focusing on what to do when you have a breach. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. And so we can do everything that we can, but let's have a tabletop exercise and say, "Okay, just like we do when there's an emergency event like a fire or a robbery or a tornado or a pandemic.
We have tabletop exercises to say, okay, what do we do when this happens?" And I don't think credit unions do a good job at that. I think that when a breach happens, everybody freaks out. Everybody, nobody knows what to do. And in some cases, you don't find out about it for months. And I think that the case that just happened with um, there were 60 credit unions affected by that.
I don't know the details. I haven't seen a post-mortem, but I suspect that somewhere the weakest link was a person and they probably didn't find out about it for a while and at that point the damage was done. And maybe they didn't have the tabletop exercises to be able to respond super quickly. So let's talk about a robbery as compared to cybersecurity.
In a robbery at the, in a financial institution, that's always a threat. And it has been forever. As long as there's been financial institutions that have money, robbers are going to target you, right? No different with cybercriminals. And we practice that over and over and over and over again. So when there is an incident, the employees instantly know how to react.
They know what to do. They know who to call. They know where to go. And that's what we need to focus on in credit union land around cyber events as well.
Close
[Joshua Barclay] Let's bring this show to a close. Elizabeth Osborne, thank you so much for joining us today. We've had a great time and we've learned so much from what you've shared. Do you have any final thoughts or advice for any current or future leaders out there?
[Elizabeth Osborne] Yeah, I would say, and it's not like earth-shattering special news, but it's something that I found was the most successful for me is that I took a chance. Right? So if there was a job opening that was in an area I knew nothing about, and if you think about like your long-term goals, if it kind of led to that, it's like, "Hey, I'm going to raise my hand and say, maybe I should be considered." And so that has really helped me.
It brings a lot of different perspectives. I think working in different departments, different industries, different sizes of companies gives you that broad perspective that you can really gain so much information that's so important. A lot of people are really scared to make that change, to take that leap to try, and having the confidence to give it a try and just say, "Hey, you know what?
If I fail, I fail, but I tried something new, and you're going to learn a lot about yourself, um, doing that process." That's so important, and that will lead to your growth, whether now is the right fit or not.
[Joshua Barclay] The Chief Operations Officer of Great Lakes Credit Union, Elizabeth Osborne. Thank you again for joining us today. Becky, thank you as always. And another huge thanks to Silvur for sponsoring this episode. Remember, Silvur is the retirement planning solution designed to help empower your members to save for a comfortable retirement.
And finally, a thank you to you, our audience, for listening to another great episode of Grow Your Credit Union. Take care. Bye-bye.