Innovation Federal Credit Union improves member experience and contact center productivity with Dynamics 365 Contact Center

Innovation Federal Credit Union (Innovation) is one of the largest credit unions in Saskatchewan, offering personal and business banking and investment services to more than 69,000 members across Canada and managing nearly $5 billion in assets. As part of its commitment to providing exceptional member service at every opportunity, the credit union turned to Dynamics 365 Contact Center to give digital advice center staff integrated live chat, voice, and SMS (text message) communication tools and a complete view of each member during every interaction. Now, Innovation provides a better member experience while driving performance and productivity gains for its digital advice center employees.

Outgoing technology prompts a search for new tools

Since 2020, Innovation added Dynamics 365 Finance, Sales, Customer Service, and Customer Insights, along with loan origination solution VeriPark VeriLoan, to its investments in Microsoft Azure Data Lake, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Microsoft 365. Something was still missing, however. Over the past few years, Innovation has focused on growing its business beyond Saskatchewan and improving the customer experience for its members. To do that, its digital advice center staff needed new tools. “We were using Skype for a lot of our telecommunications, and we knew that technology was going to be discontinued,” says Chad Gartner, Vice President of Consumer Advisors at Innovation Federal Credit Union. “We also wanted to engage with our members through different channels such as chat and SMS and get a 360-degree view of our members so we could help our employees be more productive and efficient on calls.”

Innovation chose to build on its Dynamics 365 environment, adding Dynamics 365 Contact Center for digital messaging channels including live chat, voice, and SMS. The credit union refers to the integrated solution as its member relationship management system, or MRM.

Integrated communications and knowledge base boost first-call resolutions

Innovation uses Dynamics 365 Contact Center as its frontline customer interaction solution for current and prospective members. Innovation’s more than 120 digital advice center employees field requests by phone, chat, SMS, and messages in the Innovation Federal CU mobile app, helping members apply for loans and mortgages, address balance inquiries, make deposits, and set up new accounts. The credit union’s knowledge base is integrated with Dynamics 365 Customer Service, allowing digital advice center staff to answer member questions using information from company documents online.

“We get more than 700-800 calls and 20-50 chats a day,” says Vishnu Singh, Vice President Growth & Member Experience at Innovation Federal Credit Union. “We strive for first-call resolution, with around 80% of members’ calls currently resolved at the first point of contact.”

A 360-degree view and customer sentiment analysis improve members’ experience

Dynamics 365 gives credit union managers deeper insight into customer service and provides digital advice center staff with information that can help improve the member experience.

“With all communications managed in Dynamics 365,” says Jayden Weston, Vice President, Member Advisors at Innovation Federal Credit Union, “our digital advice center employees get a 360-degree view of our members. As soon as a member initiates a call or chat, the member’s full profile is available to the advisor on our MRM screen, displaying all the products that member has as well as any other discussions they have had with us. We can also choose the next best action to proactively discuss other products and services to talk about with that member.”

Transcripts of each chat, email, SMS, or voice interaction, automatically stored in Dynamics 365, help employees understand members’ needs and are used for reviewing calls for quality monitoring, setting targets, identifying trends in member interactions, and sentiment analysis. Innovation uses customer sentiment to coach digital advice center employees on the language they use during customer interactions, which further helps improve the quality of service. “Our goal is to have positive interactions with our members, and we’re using the sentiment analysis from Dynamics 365 Contact Center to get a sense of how our members feel about us so we can adjust if we need to,” says Tera Lowrie, Vice President, Consumer Advisors at Innovation Federal Credit Union.

Digital advice center employees can review the customer sentiment in the previous day’s call transcripts on a dashboard, and, says Weston, “we have daily check-ins with employees to review member sentiment and talk about how we can focus on making negative experiences more positive. We also review historical transcripts with advisors to ensure we’re doing quality work.”

Dashboards drive digital advice center performance and productivity gains 

Dynamics 365 dashboards and on-demand analytical reports help Innovation provide more effective member support. To help drive improvements in digital advice center productivity and efficiency, a Member Obsess Agile Team meets every day to view dashboard metrics and address member issues, and managers track overall handling times and how quickly problems are resolved on easy-to-understand executive dashboards. “Creating a report used to take hours, because I had to jump between different systems to pull data,” says Weston. “Being able to get all that data in a dashboard view has been a huge time saver from a leadership perspective.”

The dashboards give credit union leadership teams fast access to important information, such as call abandonment rates and average member wait times. “Dynamics 365 provides us with abandon call rate and average speed to answer metrics. This helps ensure our advisors are available and answering calls as quickly as they can,” says Gartner.

Weston adds, “Dynamics 365 gives us both real-time and historical analysis. With real-time data, we can see the number of incoming conversations and how many digital advice center employees are available, so our managers can monitor that data throughout the day. With this solution, we have the tools to be more productive and impactful in our work.”