BCU listens to member owners like never before

As an organization never satisfied with the status quo, BCU has set lofty business goals for itself:

• Ensure all products and services bring measureable value to members’ lives
• Be laser-focused on having 95% of all transactions conducted through self-serve methods
• Grow the business by nearly 20% year-over-year for the next 5 years
• Achieve scalable servicing excellence, operational optimization and cost mitigation

To achieve these aggressive goals, BCU is committed to developing the highest standard of excellence and scaling it across its team of 65 call center agents. As an organization, BCU measures ROA, NPS and operating expenses as trackable metrics. As a department, Member Relations considers NPS its north star. Like most organizations, post-interaction surveys have historically not provided the level of insight needed to drive BCU enterprise-wide goals.

Primary need

A major pain point for all credit unions is the fact that members prefer to call for help vs. using self-service solutions to solve a problem. BCU is no exception and has stated organizational goals to increase self-service transactions. With millions of uncaptured data points coming into the call center, BCU needed to dive deeper into the everyday conversations occurring with their members. BCU understood that their members were providing valuable feedback on both their strengths and opportunities with every single customer call. However, BCU was not able to capture and convert that feedback into structured, unbiased data using its current tools. The BCU team felt a deeper dataset could be uncovered through the use of Tethr’s AI-powered communications intelligence platform. If BCU could understand why member owners felt and acted a certain way, they could build strategies to drive toward BCU’s 2020 goals and beyond. As a fellow member of CEB’s customer contact leadership group, BCU was introduced to Tethr and recognized the opportunity to transform its unstructured data into actionable insights.

Big time results

Within a matter of months, Tethr helped BCU develop a new lens into member service they couldn’t even fathom before.

• Quantify and measure the impact of its servicing competencies within each member interaction
• Gather the data required to understand the member journey
• Stop relying on the practice of manual evaluation processes

“Hands-down the biggest gain to-date is the ability to unlock the unstructured data in customer calls; meaning the Member Relations team can say they’ve hit their objective by bringing Tethr on as a business partner.”

With Tethr’s platform, BCU has:

Cut call monitoring time of QA staff by 80%, giving the team more time to understand, analyze and surface insights with the data generated. Boosted both member-specific and agent-specific insights by 3,000%. In doing so, BCU now can show measurable improvements in service quality through an automated quality review process. This is already helping cross-functional departments answer the questions of “what” and “how much”, which are key priorities for the business. Built a foundation for the BCU steering committee to identify the top 10 opportunities for making critical business decisions. Some include areas of risk / compliance, fee policies, new member experience and developing lines of products in the pipeline.

Key benefits and future goals

Tethr has proven its value to BCU through its efforts in the call center. In 2018, BCU will be expanding its use of Tethr to six additional function areas. They now want to apply Tethr to areas in non-phone call channels, such as chat, video chat and/or secure email channel. Tethr will also help BCU drive cost mitigation efforts through an increase in self-service, decreased handle times, repeat callers and member pain points. Finally, Tethr will help BCU drive a deeper relationship with member owners in the form of proper membership experiences, financial wellness education and retention.