You can’t win if you don’t play…You’ve got to be in it to win it…
The clichés above, we’ve all heard them. They are the sayings that make us drop a token in the slot machine or roll the dice at the craps table while attending an industry conference or an annual meeting.
Quick wins, right? We all love them. We all want them. They’re the reason we pick up pennies when they are heads-up on the ground and why we play scratch offs and mega millions. (Well, only when the prize is like $6.8 BILLION, because, let’s face it, it’s not really worth it to pull over and buy a $2 or $3 ticket when the pot is only $300K, right?)
Unlike winning the lottery or hitting the Wheel of Fortune jackpot, becoming a data savvy credit union doesn’t happen overnight. However, you can “set the wheels in motion” and start moving in the right direction by establishing goals that can help you get some quick wins under your belt. Becoming data savvy means you’re “winning” with your members.
When I first started playing with data (and developing a small obsession in the process), quick wins were the targets that would show positive movement in our scorecard measures. You know what scorecard measures are, right? They’re the numbers that matter to your Board because, quite honestly, they’re the numbers that determine your credit union’s longevity.
But while they’re incredibly important, scorecard numbers don’t always gel with the numbers that matter to marketers like me. I focus on numbers that measure things like depth-of-relationship, percentage of single service households, number of touch points with a member during onboarding, and increasing relevant communications with members. These measurements speak to my love of the member experience.
Balance. When you take a balanced approach to using data, it’s possible to improve your member experience while also achieving the goals that affect your credit union’s scorecard. Whether you’re trying to reduce operating expenses, increase non-interest income, improve loan growth, or accomplish anything else your credit union deems important, those changes can most likely be driven by data that’s already available to you. From your core and online banking platform to your mobile analytics and credit card transactions, there are a variety of channels that can provide the numbers you need.
Tennis legend, Boris Becker, once said, “I love the winning, I can take the losing, but most of all, I love to play.” This! This is how I feel when I talk about data and what it can mean for the member experience. Not every target that we map out will work and not every channel will be the right one. We may fail more often than we succeed in the beginning, but finding out what works and what doesn’t allows us to fine-tune our approach for better results in the future.
Since we started with a cliché, it only makes sense to end with one as well: “If you want to run with the big dogs, you have to get off the porch.” To get off that proverbial porch, you’ll have to step outside your comfort zone and start experimenting. Find out what data you can use to make your members feel special, improve member interactions, and achieve the kind of results that prove what understanding the data can really do. Set easy goals. I am not telling you to be lazy, but “quick win” goals should be goals that you can set and accomplish using a minimal amount of data and the least amount of cost (time, effort and dollars).
