By Stuart R. Levine, Chairman and CEO, Stuart Levine & Associates LLC
May 2025
Credit Union Times

Ensuring that your actions reflect the mission of your credit union is a sacred responsibility.  Now more than ever, with uncertainty and disruption in the consumer/member experience, it’s critical that credit unions pause, breathe and embrace your values which center on the member experience as a key differentiator to banks.  It’s not just about slick new rebranding efforts designed to introduce a new name for a prosperous credit union.  It’s about truly reflecting on whether your processes and systems are designed to ensure a positive and user-friendly member experience. 

The story represented below is real and current.  The experience was enough to turn a member who was positive towards the institution for decades into an extremely unhappy member who would probably never recommend the credit to another community member. 

It centered around a process for those who place their mortgage payments on auto pay.  At the same time every year, in late March, members are required to receive a letter from the credit union indicating a new mortgage payment amount based on changing escrow amounts. 

The new letter did not match the amounts reflected on the website for payments due on April 1, creating massive confusion and frustration.  If the member paid the amounts on the website, it would be wrong and trigger a late payment fee.  In addition, every year, it is the responsibility of the member to update their own auto pay amounts on the website.  Finding the location of how to do this on the website is impossible.  It requires calls into the organization who then have to direct one to the button which is at the bottom of the page and not clearly visible. 

This process actually took over three days to resolve, with perhaps four or five hours being devoted to figuring out this situation.  Team members in the organization continued to escalate the issue with the highest levels of customer service apologizing for the flaws in the system. Finally, at the end of the process, an email was received saying to log into the website to see a new message. There were no messages there pertaining to this problem.   

Is the back-office technology system in the mortgage department intentionally designed to extract additional fees from the member?  Is the discrepancy between the new escrow letter and the inaccurate information on the website clearly understood by the leadership and management of the credit union?  This problem is impacting every single individual mortgage holder on auto pay with their organization.  If left unresolved, this practice will surely lead to the erosion of the member relationships which are core to the mission of the credit union.

Dedicated CEOs need to have internal mechanisms where they see and touch and interface directly with members who are having difficulties navigating their systems.  A way to do this would be for the CEO to build a system for a year where they individually would see every consumer complaint, which would provide terrific data and insights into the way the organization is run.

A note to the boards of directors. If you are not seeing member satisfaction scores or interfacing with members directly, you are failing in your primary mission of ensuring continuity of the organization.  If leadership is not collecting data from their membership to uncover issues like the one mentioned above, they are missing an opportunity to understand the functionality of the organization. Additionally, if something is systemically wrong, they needs to hold leadership responsible to fix it.

The banking system is questioning the existing tax advantages provided to credit unions.  It would behoove all credit unions to move with speed and take a deep dive into their processes to ensure that member satisfaction is not being destroyed.   There was an article written perhaps a decade ago entitled, “Putting the Service Profit Chain to Work.”  It provided a clear scale of customer/member satisfaction with 10 being an Apostle and 0 being a Terrorist.  The story above, turned this member into a Terrorist. 

For the sake of your members’ sanity, take the time to review your systems as if you were the member.  If your systems are cumbersome, inaccurate or unfair, this will cost you member retention, referrals and successful rebranding your institution, if that is your desired goal.  Slick and impressive designs, announcements and member outreach, when not reflected in your actual services and processes, will go a long way towards destroying all the costly marketing efforts designed to positively impact your brand.  For more information, contact hlevine@stuartlevine.com