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Report #416 | | Members | Sign In

User Experience Design: Insights for Credit Unions

When choosing fintech options, credit unions are uniquely positioned to select products that not only provide state-of-the-art options to their members, but that distinguish credit union value propositions from other financial institutions. This report provides insights for credit unions to leverage their core principles when designing the interface that becomes the customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX).

Executive Summary

If you build it, they will come. That adage holds true for customer experiences (CX) that delight credit union members and inspire credit union employees and management to go the distance and ease their pain.

Collectively, credit unions have a century of CX knowledge, providing services known to meet members’ needs through traditional credit union delivery channels at branches, online, and smartphone apps.

Cloud-based and increasingly accessible financial technology (fintech) permits financial institutions and non-financial-institution start-ups attracting more than $22 billion in equity funding to rapidly prototype, test, tweak, and launch innovations in digital user experience (UX) design, quickly outpacing credit union CX and credit union apps’ UX. CX/UX design in social media (think Facebook, Twitter, and Medium), information discovery (think Quora and Wikipedia), data analytics (think Tableau), personal health care (think HealthTap), and other technologies has raised the bar of service delivery simplicity that members expect from credit unions, and far beyond where banks and non-bank providers have aimed their CX/UX.

Sampling overall customer experience with brands (CX) and individual applications’ touchpoints (UX) reveals critical areas where credit unions must excel by focusing on blending a mix of products and services that raise member wealth and lifecycle agility: CX reflects the total experiences that credit union members associate with the brand and organization, through interactions with individual credit union products and services (UX). Tracing the UX of a loan transaction, online account statement, or customer support call describes a branch of the tree that represents the shape and health of the CX relationship with the credit union member, as it takes root and stands out in the forest of banks and other financial services providers.

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