Avrio Corporation Success Story

Wescom Credit Union has established itself as a leader among credit unions in Southern California and across the nation. With a strong commitment to using new technologies to improve service to its members, Wescom has transformed its back-end systems into direct service advantage for its members. In 2003, Wescom identified the opportunity to further enhance customer care by speeding responsiveness to its weekly member surveys. By streamlining survey data input and automating routing of comments to key management, Wescom has impressed its members with its immediate attention to their concerns.

While customer service is paramount for any financial services company, credit unions have even greater motivation to provide outstanding customer care — their members are also the owners. Since its founding in 1934, Wescom Credit Union has made an ongoing commitment to providing its member-owners with the most outstanding service available. Whether in a branch, on the phone, or online, Wescom makes every effort to leverage all the physical, human, and technology assets at its disposal to ensure it meets the needs of its members.

Today, with over 215,000 members and $2.6 billion in assets, Wescom Credit Union is among the largest credit unions in the country. The company operates over 26 branches throughout five counties in Southern California and continues to grow its market base. By leveraging technology to increase the value it delivers to customers at every interaction, Wescom stands at the forefront of transforming traditional financial services business processes into tangible advantage for its members.

The Problem

As part of its efforts to ensure superior service, Wescom has regularly surveyed members using mail and email questionnaires to benchmark service quality and satisfaction. Over 1,000 surveys go out each week, with a return rate ranging from 10-15%. Wescom recognized that the growing volume of survey responses could ultimately cause delays in responding to the comments, questions, concerns, and needs communicated by its members.

Wescom saw the survey process as a critical area where it could leverage technology to demonstrate its commitment to its members.

The company identified Enterprise Content Management as an important tool in enhancingits interactions with members. Rather than focusing on a smaller, less impactful area to test these technologies, Wescom put the interests of its members first by selecting its customer satisfaction survey for its first deployment of ECM. It is this type of dedication to member satisfaction and technological advancement that has resulted in Wescom’s continuing market penetration and outstanding customer perception.

The Solution

Wescom looked to FileNet Enterprise Content Management (ECM) to help optimize its member survey process and enhance its customer service efforts as quickly as possible. Once the need was identified, Wescom worked with Avrio Corporation, a FileNet ValueNetPartner, to implement the solution. Avrio spent one month working closely with Wescom to define the requirements and launched the automated survey response system only two and a half months later.

Before FileNet, the surveys were opened, keyed into the tabulation system and then the survey or a copy was forwarded to the appropriate staff to review and respond. Today, this all happens automatically. Surveys are scanned in the morning. Those with comments that require entering into the system are immediately sent by the system to the data entry personnel, and comments in need of management review automatically route to the appropriate people. On a monthly basis, Wescom management responds to 100- 150 member comments. Previously, these surveys might have taken longer to receive a response, but today escalation timers ensure they are addressed in a timely fashion.

In addition to responding much faster to the feedback from specific members, Wescom’s management team now has immediate access to real-time reports of results. Results of the scanned surveys are now typically available before noon. With this system, the company takes immediate, proactive action to address opportunities and concerns brought up in the surveys. These efforts ensure Wescom provides immediate solutions to customer problems, boosting customer loyalty and motivating positive word-of-mouth.

Based on the overwhelming success in the survey application, Wescom plans to expand its use of FileNet ECM to improve responsiveness and increase customer service in other applications. The company has already launched its second ECM implementation in direct
lending and has seen an immediate 3 day reduction in processing times. Wescom has also identified opportunities to speed processing and enhance the member experience in customer communications management as well.

“After seeing the initial benefit in our survey application, departments ranging from human resources to real estate to accounting have asked us to determine where ECM can benefit their processes. We’re always looking for ways to improve the delivery of our services,” says Mary Sagerman, Manager of the Workflow Systems Department.

The Benefits

Wescom has gotten tremendous feedback from its senior management regarding the improved responsiveness FileNet has enabled within the organization. What had been a slow manual process has become an area where Wescom now wows its members with attentiveness and speedy response by addressing comments within 48 hours.

“From our perspective, Enterprise Content Management is one of the cornerstones of our exceptional responsiveness to members,” says Rob Guilford, Senior Vice President of Information Technology.

The company has also seen dramatic decreases in workload for the team that manages the survey process. Instead of having to review every survey, the data entry person now only looks at the 50% that require manual intervention. And today, executive reviewers have immediate simultaneous access to the tools, customer information, and survey content that enable them to make better decisions, faster.

Throughout its history, Wescom Credit Union has always put its member-owners first. The company knows that technology plays an important part in this and has aggressively pursued leading edge technologies to enhance the member experience. It is this commitment to leveraging technology resources for direct customer benefit that has ensured Wescom’s place as a market leader throughout Southern California and the nation.

“Improving our processes has made us more responsive to our customers,” says John Stachela, Marketing Specialist.