InMoment Helps Solarity Gather Timely Feedback

When your brand promise is to be the financial services organization of choice for people who want extraordinary experiences, you need a customer feedback management platform that can help you keep that commitment. Solarity Credit Union wasn’t hearing from its members often enough to deliver the kind of experience it touts.

“We knew that to provide an extraordinary experience, we needed that regular feedback on an ongoing basis,” says Mina Worthington, CEO of the Yakima, Wash., institution.

Surveys were already a part of the credit union’s strategy, but Worthington says it was an antiquated process that couldn’t generate the insight her team needed. “We were looking for more immediate feedback and the ability to have our members respond quickly and in a very succinct way,” she explains. That commitment to bolstering the customer experience prompted the team to find a solution that tapped into the needs and expectations of customers.

Solarity selected the InMoment platform in large part for its contemporaneous feedback loop, a critical component that would support its mission to provide excellent service.

Solarity’s approach includes an omnichannel customer listening program across touch points, including mortgage, in-branch, call center, mobile banking, and web-based surveys that contain structured and open-ended feedback channels. From there, strategic insights are sent in real time to the executive team.

“When we capture the member at the right moment and we have an opportunity to correct a situation immediately, we touch members in a special way, and we can create raving fans,” Worthington says.

InMoment essentially listens to feedback across a number of channels, looking for the digital bread crumbs customers typically leave behind. “It pairs all of those,” explains Erich Dietz, senior vice president at InMoment. “It’s direct feedback, like surveys, and indirect feedback, such as social media. We bring all of that together.” The platform creates listening posts on the channels used by the organization’s customers and employees, then applies analytics and predictive technologies to that data, driving smarter actions downstream.

To ensure the incoming information doesn’t languish, Solarity employs a part-time person whose job it is to respond to the data coming out of InMoment. If she receives data during the day, she responds to it right away. Results that arrive in the evening are addressed first thing in the morning. “She responds to members with issues that need to be resolved,” Worthington says. “She also follows up in response to members who give positive feedback and encourages them to provide additional feedback.”

Customer feedback is far more accessible, timely, and actionable now that the InMoment solution is in place. Worthington offers an example of where positive results have already appeared. “We were getting feedback from members who were engaging with us on our digital platforms,” she explains. Some of that feedback was good but some of it highlighted areas where the institution could do better.

By working with a test group of the credit union’s members, Worthington says, “we’re making major revisions to our online and mobile banking this year, and that group of members is giving us feedback on our digital platforms.”

Thanks to Solarity’s willingness to listen to and act on customer feedback, the credit union has increased its Net Promoter Score (NPS) by 40 percent. Member loyalty has increased and the organization now has new opportunities to demonstrate its focus on outstanding member experience. Solarity was also chosen from more than 400 businesses as InMoment’s Customer First Award winner, which recognizes an InMoment client that upholds a customer-centric business model.

With its feedback program in good shape and the early results already having a positive impact on the organization’s other initiatives, Solarity is working to expand its reach beyond transactions. “One thing we’re working on is to survey our members throughout the mortgage lending process,” she explains.

The team plans to use that feedback to identify touch points that could help Solarity “ensure we’re surprising and delighting our members throughout the loan process,” Worthington says. 

The Payoff

Since deploying InMoment’s platform, Solarity Credit Union has seen the following results:

• a 40 percent increase in Net Promoter Score;
• a sharp increase in customer loyalty; and
• additional opportunities to create positive customer experiences.