With Twitter, Facebook, mobile banking apps and 4G-poweredsmartphones 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 tomembers who want a higher degree of attentiveness and personalattention than they would otherwise receive from traditional banks.Caring about and achieving member satisfaction is a criticalelement in the continued success of credit unions.

Whether by email, SMS, fax or telephone, credit union membersexpect – in fact demand prompt, efficient service. People today aresimply accustomed to immediate access to information andresponses.

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

The challenge with many products is that they are often notintegrated. This means if an agent is logged into a phonequeue and a separate Web chat, nothing prevents that agent fromreceiving another phone call and chat at the same time.

The only way to prevent this problem and have agents log intoone system or the other, is with supervisors manually determiningwhen 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 providescredit unions with a single decision making engine that automatesthe immediate distribution of member requests, and minimizes theneed for constant human monitoring and intervention. This“intelligent routing” frees supervisors to coach their staff on howto provide the exceptional service that their membersdeserve.

A properly configured, single multimedia queuing engine can makerouting and delivery decisions much faster than any person watchingdisparate systems and making manual decisions andadjustments.

The end result? Higher efficiency and lower wait times formembers.

Service levels will improve as you pool all resources into asingle group, which enables skills-based routing to make decisionsinstantaneously. Specific requests go straight to the right expertor the correct queue in the contact center regardless of thatrequest's media type.

The bottom line for credit unions is that multimedia contactcenters – sourced from a single decision-making engine – canincrease member satisfaction with less waiting, less frustrationand less dissatisfaction.

ErnieWallerstein is president, Americas of Zeacom of Auckland, NewZealand.