With Twitter, Facebook, mobile banking apps and 4G-powered smartphones with more horsepower than PCs from even two years ago, today's consumers are always connected.  

Credit union boards do not answer to stockholders, but rather to members who want a higher degree of attentiveness and personal attention than they would otherwise receive from traditional banks. Caring about and achieving member satisfaction is a critical element in the continued success of credit unions.

Whether by email, SMS, fax or telephone, credit union members expect – in fact demand prompt, efficient service. People today are simply accustomed to immediate access to information and responses.   

Luckily, there are many contact center and customer interaction technologies that enable credit unions to offer the same multimedia solutions as other, and often larger, financial institutions.

The challenge with many products is that they are often not integrated.  This means if an agent is logged into a phone queue and a separate Web chat, nothing prevents that agent from receiving another phone call and chat at the same time. 

The only way to prevent this problem and have agents log into one system or the other, is with supervisors manually determining when to have agents log out of one system into another when calls, chats, emails, etc., have higher wait times.

Having an integrated solution for all multimedia queues provides credit unions with a single decision making engine that automates the immediate distribution of member requests, and minimizes the need for constant human monitoring and intervention.  This “intelligent routing” frees supervisors to coach their staff on how to provide the exceptional service that their members deserve. 

A properly configured, single multimedia queuing engine can make routing and delivery decisions much faster than any person watching disparate systems and making manual decisions and adjustments. 

The end result?  Higher efficiency and lower wait times for members. 

Service levels will improve as you pool all resources into a single group, which enables skills-based routing to make decisions instantaneously. Specific requests go straight to the right expert or the correct queue in the contact center regardless of that request's media type.

The bottom line for credit unions is that multimedia contact centers – sourced from a single decision-making engine – can increase member satisfaction with less waiting, less frustration and less dissatisfaction.

Ernie Wallerstein is president, Americas of Zeacom of Auckland, New Zealand.