In the age of technology, everyone is seeking faster, easier ways to communicate. Knowing that members interact with your credit union through multiple channels now more than ever, it is important to take a multi-channel approach when marketing, selling or servicing their accounts. As a byproduct of COVID, multi-channel communication options are now really a pre-requisite to meet the expectations of your digitally savvy members, regardless of the generation they belong to. Let’s talk about the multi-channel channel experience.
Your Members Expect Multiple Channels
A multi-channel strategy creates a seamless integrated experience for members. Consumers expect this multi-channel access because they are continuously connected. We all know first-hand that today’s consumers are viewing content and reading articles on their smartphones, playing games or watching movies on their tablets, while working on their laptops – and typically doing all of these things concurrently. And while consumers are “device multi-tasking” with their phones, tablets, and laptops, there are even more internet-connected devices in their homes such as smartwatches, virtual assistants, and smart TVs.
A multi-channel strategy is import so that the credit union can interact with your members in each of these channels, on each of these devices. This approach ensures that your communication strategy can meet the current and future member expectations - regardless of which channel they may be using at any given time.
Those who wear the Marketing hat for the credit union know that a marketing message must be heard or seen five times for it to be recognized. With a multi-channel approach, you would spread those five marketing impressions out across the different channels instead of presenting the same message five times in the same channel, and this approach can reduce message abandonment. And since today’s consumers expect marketing communications to be personalized experiences, it’s important to realize that disassociated messages across various channels to the same end user will be quickly dismissed. With this in mind, it’s important to have a targeted marketing approach with the same campaigns running across all channels.
Emerge with a Future-Proof Multi-Channel Experience
Connect’s Emerge Digital Platform is available on almost any device a member might think to use when interacting with your credit union. And with over 150+ third-party providers available through the platform, members can self-complete most of the functions that a credit union staff member would do for them at a branch or over the phone.
We think it’s important for credit unions to be able to integrate any number of marketing, sales, and communication tools of your choice into the digital banking platform to support your multi-channel communication strategy. In addition to our own Connect products, we offer interfaces with many third-party partners. Or bring your own third-party companies to the mix, and we’ll get them interfaced.
A key to a multi-channel strategy is platform flexibility and Connect’s Emerge system is one of the most flexible digital banking platforms on the market for support of this goal. For example, Emerge not only offers chat, co-browsing and video banking, we also enable you to send alerts and notifications via email, text, and mobile push notifications, with targeted messages to individual members or groups.
Personalized and Consistently Integrated
Since the advent of online banking in the late 90’s, the term “omni-channel” has been thrown around. Omni-channel technically means being available in multiple channels. However, today, the concept of “multi-channel” takes that premise one step further by creating a consistent personalized experience across all member touch points.
Just as non-interactive websites are considered simple brochureware, early implementations of omni-channel were little better than merely “showing up” in multiple channels. That’s not good enough anymore. Today’s consumers demand fully-functional interaction regardless of the channel(s) they choose to use to engage with the credit union, and those communications need to be personalized and consistently integrated across all channels.
It wasn’t that long ago that many credit union executives believed an omni-channel experience or even a digital transformation to be out of reach (perhaps because they were never clearly defined). Today, our Emerge technology enables credit unions or ALL sizes to incorporate a strategy that is personalized and multi-channel. To continue the dialogue, contact your Connect Account Executive and let’s discuss your goals for a multi-channel communication strategy.
