Credit unions are looking to personalize their customer experience offerings by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), particularly as customer expectations have changed in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the mass employee resignations that have followed.

Financial institutions have struggled to keep up with customer demand since the pandemic began as branches shuttered and call volumes spiked while employee resignations jumped, Karan Kashyap, co-founder and chief executive of conversational AI platform Posh, said Tuesday during CMFG Ventures’ webinar, “Driving Automation and Personalization Through Fintech Adoption.”

Credit unions have begun to modernize their tech stacks with AI to personalize the customer experience, he said.

“Some of the clients that we work with just wanted to update legacy interactive voice response [IVR] systems … in place of an old system they had for 15 to 20 years, for example,” he said. “The impacts really are driven by both personalization as well as the need to augment resources.”

Automation at scale

The so-called “great resignation” has highlighted the importance of Chelsea, Mass.-based Metro Credit Union‘s efforts to scale automation from both a front- and back-office perspective, noted Traci Michel, chief operating officer at the credit union. The $2.6 billion Metro is evaluating automation solutions to replace low-complexity conversations so that existing staff can instead work on more complex exchanges, she added.

“Some of our processes inherently drive call volume,” Michel said. “If we can find ways to automate and get ahead of those friction points — whether it’s through digital communication or just by solving a problem that the member didn’t know they had on the backend — we reduce that call volume and deliver a better experience.”

Automation can also help credit unions reach out to members and keep the same level of trust,  Tracy Ingram, chief digital and infrastructure officer at Dunedin, Fla.-based $2.5 billion Achieva Credit Union, pointed out during the webinar.

Personal touch

While implementing new automation can seem overwhelming, it is important to start, Ingram said.

“You have to start somewhere and make it one of the highest priorities because that consumer dynamic has just changed such a great deal,” she added.

Still, the personal interactions for which credit unions are known risk getting lost in a file server environment, according to Sarah Martin, CEO of the Ireland-based Pulsate, a mobile marketing platform for financial institutions.

Credit unions are being challenged to maintain personal relationships with their customers at a time when most consumers use their smartphones for banking services, Martin said.

“If you can remind somebody that they are eligible for a loan when they’re at a car dealership, it’s creating urgency,” she said. “But, it’s also making them feel like you know them and you’re serving them.”

Bank Automation Summit Fall, taking place Sept. 19-20 in Seattle, is a crucial event on automation and automation technology in banking. Learn more and register for Bank Automation Summit Fall 2022.