Executive Summary
Zach Eychaner, VP of Digital Experience at ELGA Credit Union, says the contact center shaped how he sees members. He led contact centers at credit unions whose members have lower incomes and tighter budgets, so call volumes run higher than at the average bank or credit union. Eychaner says the demographics in survey results and outreach skew older, which leaves large blind spots. Hearing the unvarnished truth of people’s experience taught him what matters and what does not.
He says a blast to everyone mostly reaches people who would have said yes anyway, and it builds skepticism about marketing. A subject line that speaks to someone is the one that gets opened.
Eychaner says a defined strategy decides what he pursues. After 23 years in the work, he says he has appreciated opportunity cost only in the last five or six. He describes waiting on a fraud mitigation tool after a successful pilot, because a platform change 12 months out would bring tools that could be complementary but could also compete. His defined digital experience and marketing strategy gives him a constant check on whether a new idea advances the plan.
He says personalization depends on a process that works, and he recommends journey mapping with the people who do the work showing the process instead of explaining it. At a prior credit union, an account opening step required three clicks, and the staff no longer noticed.
Personalization can feel creepy, he says, especially without established trust. He also says institutions need to define who they are targeting and keep safeguards so one person does not receive differently personalized messages. For ELGA, that means deposit-focused messaging for people with significant balances and a message of help without judgment for people looking for financing.
Eychaner says he now builds visibility into every feature. He describes a card swapping feature that went months without working, with no reporting, no calls, and no complaints. He now sets expectations for adoption and growth, watches cognitive load, and removes features that go unused to make room for something that adds value. He says some good ideas do not take off, and if people were told the right way and still do not care, it is okay to take the feature away.
On why members go to Reddit for money advice, Eychaner says the draw is real people with no judgment and no agenda, and he adds that they are often very wrong. He says ELGA is working toward offering relevant, helpful information that is not self-serving, so members learn to come to the credit union with their questions.
His challenge to credit union leaders is to start the thing they are afraid to begin because it is not perfect yet, and learn from it.
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Key Takeaways
- The Contact Center Shows Who Outreach Misses: Eychaner says members on tighter budgets call more often, and survey and outreach data skew older, which leaves blind spots. Hearing the unvarnished truth of people’s experience shows what matters and what does not.
- Blasting Everyone Builds Skepticism About Marketing: Eychaner says the same offer to everyone mostly reaches the people who would have said yes anyway. A subject line that speaks to someone is the one that gets opened.
- A Defined Strategy Makes Opportunity Cost Visible: Eychaner says that once he defined his digital experience and marketing strategy, he had a constant check on whether a new idea advances the plan. He describes waiting on a fraud tool after a successful pilot because a better plan was coming.
- Ask People to Show the Process, Then Fix It Before You Personalize: Eychaner says staff who do the work every day can be blind to friction, such as a step that required three clicks. He says unfixed friction hurts conversion and trust, so it is worth cleaning up what you can before bringing more people in.
- Define Who You Are Targeting, and Protect Trust: Eychaner says personalization can feel creepy, especially without established trust. He says institutions need a clear target, a strategy teams keep checking against, and safeguards so one person does not receive differently personalized messages.
- Measure Adoption, and Earn Trust Before Members Go Elsewhere: Eychaner says every feature needs visibility into who uses it and a view of what adoption should look like. He says members go to Reddit for advice with no judgment, and credit unions earn their way in with relevant information that is not self-serving.
Full Episode Transcript
Alex Jiménez: Welcome to Next Best Action. My guest today is Zach Eychaner, VP of Digital Experience at ELGA Credit Union, a community development financial institution in Michigan that serves many members other institutions overlook. Zach came up through the contact center. He started as a teller, ran call centers, worked in consumer lending, and led technology and innovation at credit unions across Michigan before returning to ELGA to run its digital experience. He cares about financial democratization, giving people access to the same tools and guidance that used to be reserved to those who already had money. Welcome, Zach.
Zach Eychaner: Hi, thanks for having me.
Alex: Sure. You and I share similar backgrounds in certain areas. I was never a teller, but I did run a call center. And I ran a couple of different organizations within a community bank. So you and I have lived similar challenges, particularly when everything’s burning and suddenly you have to jump in on the phone and take calls. That was not my favorite time being at a bank, that’s for sure.
Zach: Yeah, absolutely.
Alex: So what I want to talk about is reaching members that generic outreach never touched. What it takes to serve them something relevant, and how you know when that’s working. The first question I have is, you came up through the call center. Who did you talk to there that the credit union’s normal outreach would have missed?
Zach: Everybody. The majority of the contact centers I led at the different credit unions were at credit unions where the members are on a more restrictive budget. They have lower income, they’re more concerned about their funds. So they have higher call volumes than the average bank or credit union. We got a lot of calls from everybody for all kinds of different reasons. And when you look at our survey results and the other things that we do in outreach to try to understand the needs of the people we serve, the demographics on those skew generally older. And so there are these huge blind spots. When you know where the members are talking at a high volume and you have access to that, it’s really important.
Coming up through the contact center has brought a perspective that I’ve retained because I did that for many years. There’s value in hearing the unvarnished truth of people’s experience. It’s been really helpful in seeing what matters and what doesn’t matter that we might spend a lot of time on too.
Alex: Yeah. It’s a different view of the world, particularly for bankers whose background has been more of, I was a commercial banker or I was a mortgage lender. They see a view that’s very specific to those products, but they don’t really get to see the person that’s struggling, the person that just had their third overdraft and is looking for some help. Certainly the call center experience is significantly different from other groups, even the branch.
Zach: Yeah, absolutely.
Alex: So when you blast the same offer to everyone, mostly the people who’d say yes anyway respond. So what are you paying for?
Zach: Not much, right? What you’re paying for at that point is creating skepticism around the success of marketing, because you’re reinforcing that these people are going to do that thing anyway. So why are we expanding a marketing team, doing additional efforts? Because it’s absolutely that, right? If you’re talking to everybody, it’s white noise. I have, I don’t know, 17,000 unread emails right now. And I’m sure a lot of people do too. But still, when you’re going through there, subject lines that speak to you, all of a sudden, okay, I’m going to click on that one, because you hooked me in. You said something that was actually relevant to me. And that’s what makes the difference.
Alex: Yep. You’ve said before that every partnership you take on is one that you don’t. What’s something you chose not to do, and how did you know?
Zach: There’s a lot. But that’s a recent epiphany. And I say that because I’ve been doing this for 23 years, and it’s probably only the last five or six years that I truly started to appreciate opportunity cost. When you choose to go right or left, or do something, you’re choosing to take resources away that could be spent somewhere else. And what really helped me figure out where to go, I’ll get to that in a second.
Recently, we had done a successful pilot for a fraud mitigation tool. All signs pointed to this makes sense. However, when we looked 12 months out from when we would have signed that contract, we had additional enhancements coming to the credit union through a platform change. That change was also going to bring a different type of fraud mitigation tool to the contact center. That could be complementary, but it could also compete. So we know that we have a better plan coming. Let’s not confuse ourselves now by trying to quickly take a small step forward. Let’s wait until we can take a clearer step forward.
But I will say that what has really helped me make that determination, and clarified all the noise, is this. There’s so much out there. I am sure I am not alone with how many salespeople are hitting my inbox, leaving me voicemails, hitting me on LinkedIn, wherever. It can be real easy to get hooked into a cool concept or a cool idea or something that seems like it could be relevant. Once I defined my actual digital experience strategy and my marketing strategy, it became an easy gut check. Is this thing advancing where we’re going, where I defined that road and that path? Is it going further on that vision, or is it pulling me away from that and taking me down something that’s kind of cool or could be neat, but isn’t really supporting what the strategy is telling me I need to accomplish? That becomes a constant gut check of, is this what we’re trying to accomplish? And it’s free, because you don’t worry about, what if I say no. I’m doing that math of, this does not directly drive that forward, so I know it’s not worth that time right now. It doesn’t mean it’s not going to come up later. But we can put that to the side and refocus.
Alex: Yeah. Sometimes I see organizations throwing technology at an issue that they have. And nowadays when we look at organizations saying, okay, we need to automate processes, sometimes you’re automating a process that’s broken. You may have the best technology, and that still delivers a bad experience because you haven’t tackled that. So thinking about how you personalize a message to a member, how do you fix those processes before you start personalizing anything?
Zach: It’s about having confidence in the information, the data, and what you’re asking a person to do. We have to look at the entire experience, the entire process from the top of the funnel all the way through. We can personalize communication and really engage people to take interest and start taking action. But if we know that they’re going to go through that process and it’s going to break down and they’re not going to have a positive experience, then we need to understand how to journey map that appropriately, see it all the way through, and then clean up those pieces that are friction points, pain points, or will negatively impact that conversion, but also hurt trust. A lot of this is about building trust. When you get into personalization, it can start to feel a little creepy depending on how personal you get and how tight you bring that through. And especially if you haven’t an established trust first.
So for me, we’ll never have all of our processes perfect at the same time, and we can’t wait until we’re perfect to take action. But it’s understanding what we’re asking for right now, what’s important right now, and is that process broken? Do we want to run a lot of people through a broken process, or do we want to make sure that we clean up what we can, and then bring people in and learn from that and help the conversion overall?
Alex: Having worked in banks and with credit unions, sometimes we see that there are stories the executives tell each other about what’s going on within the bank. Sometimes it’s informed by their latest survey, or by what they heard from Cornerstone or someone else. Once you start doing that journey mapping, you start finding out what the members are actually experiencing instead of trying to guess from a survey. What has surprised you the most as you went through that process of analyzing the experience?
Zach: It probably shouldn’t surprise me, but it’s the lack of our own understanding of what the reality is. One thing that was shocking to me at a prior credit union is that we were journey mapping the account opening process. We were doing it from the lens of, I find the credit union, I’m going to open the account, I’m going to open it online, I’m going to open it in a branch, whatever, so let’s map the whole thing out. We brought in people out of the branch who open accounts every single day, and we were asking them what the process was, and they were explaining it to us. We said, go ahead and let’s pull it up and walk through it. So we picked back up about 10 steps prior to where they were. They’re going through and clicking screens and explaining what they’re doing. And then at one point on the screen, they clicked three times to go forward once. And we’re like, but they just kept going. We said, hold on a second, what did you just do? And they said, oh, you’ve got to click three times on that spot.
Sometimes that’s the important part. You can’t even ask what the pain points are, because it’s become routine and we’ve worked around so much that it’s just habit to move past it or work around it. Executives won’t always be totally plugged in, because we’re too far away from it. But the people doing the work are blind to it too, because they do it so often. It’s really important that you take the time to go step by step. Don’t have somebody explain the process to you. Have them show you what the process is, because that’s where you’re going to get the real information.
Alex: Yeah. Also, different members will feel it differently, depending on where they go, who they deal with, who’s the person at the desk. Sometimes the processes are entirely different.
Zach: A hundred percent. And sometimes we have a standard script. Here’s what we ask every single member. Is that appropriate? It goes back to the exact same email or text, whatever. What are you doing if you’re trying to put everybody in the same box?
Alex: Right. I remember rolling out a digital account opening, and our marketing team said, this is the perfect time to gather a lot of information from people who are coming in new to the bank. They wanted to ask like 15 extra questions. And it made sense from a marketing standpoint. Hey, this is a great opportunity for us to know the customer better. But from the experience of the new person coming into the bank, it’s like, why do you need to know all these things? Why are you asking me these questions?
Zach: Probably drove the abandon rate up pretty high, huh?
Alex: Yeah, exactly. So ELGA needs deposits to make loans, but the members you most want to serve often don’t have the deposits to give. How does personalization help you with that?
Zach: It really helps us to clearly define the target markets we’re going for and how we position what we’re looking for. When we’re going to people who have significant balances that they could bring, they probably have really high credit scores. What we’re not going to do at that point is talk about car loans and personal loans, because we don’t want that business and they have options there. But we do want deposit business. So that needs to be tailored and positioned completely differently than “We’re here for people. To help everybody, to judge nobody, to help you through tough times.” That’s going to hit differently. That has to go to the group who’s potentially looking for that help, that financing, or whatever else, who feel like they don’t have the opportunity.
The entire approach on both of those is completely different. If we don’t know who we’re talking to, we could be sending something very different to a group, and they could see two completely different approaches, tones, and positioning, and it would be confusing. And then it’s like, I don’t even know who this place is. That’s important too. When you target, it’s about being consistent with how you’re targeting, and having safeguards in place so that you’re not sending multiple differently personalized messages to the same individual. Then you seem like you’re a little bit multiple personality, which could be weird.
Alex: Yeah. One of my pet peeves, and I’ve said this many times, is that my mortgage was sold to one of the top four banks. I didn’t open the mortgage with them, but that’s who holds the mortgage. And every month I get offers for a mortgage.
Zach: Yeah, right. And you’re like, but you guys already. I have one with you.
Alex: Not only that, but my rate is significantly lower than what they are today. So why would I get another mortgage? Clearly their targeting is not well thought out. And that’s one of the challenges I see banks and credit unions have, not understanding who they really are targeting. I’ve been in many rooms where we’re talking about strategy, and we say, okay, these are the four targets, and then someone else says, yes, but we also should serve this community and this other community. Next thing you know, you have 15 different targets. And it’s just as you said, who are we really serving here? That’s a big challenge. How do you make sure that you stay within the focus of your targets? Is that a challenge within the organization, or is everyone marching down the same path?
Zach: It absolutely is. It’s a challenge because we all have our own perspectives that we bring, our personal viewpoints and perspective of what’s valuable. We have to remind ourselves often of what our strategy is, what our values are, what we say we’re here to do, and does this support that or not? You need to have those checks, and you’ve got to check each other and check yourself and refocus. That’s not to say that you can’t pivot, because strategies change and opportunities change. But it should be intentional and not just, well, let’s get to everybody. You won’t be able to effectively serve everybody. You’ve got to pick where you can do the best and be the most successful, and just lean in there.
I think we do a good job at the executive level of keeping our teams away from that. We have those conversations at times, but our teams don’t feel like they’re getting whiplash, because they know what the plan is. They know how to move forward. And then we can have those conversations at a more strategic level when they’re necessary. But it’s an ongoing challenge, especially, like you said, with Cornerstone and conferences and all these different messages, this constant drip of what’s important across the entire country or in the industry. Not all of those are relevant to us, but you hear them so often that you start to feel like we have a huge opportunity that we’re not taking advantage of, when we haven’t even really defined if that opportunity is one that we should pursue and if it exists here.
Alex: Yeah, absolutely. Being in the digital space is a challenge. Sometimes you make changes and they’re catastrophic, and sometimes you make changes and nobody notices. I remember one time moving the login box on the website just a smidge, not a lot, and getting tons of phone calls at the call center, because people expected it in that very precise place. It really moved just a little bit, but they didn’t see it because it wasn’t exactly where they always see it on their monitor. But you once shipped a feature that broke for two months and nobody noticed. So how do you tell what’s quietly working from what nobody needed?
Zach: What’s important there and what that reinforced and taught me. This was a platform feature that would make card swapping really easy. This was a few years ago, but there was no visibility into adoption, usage, or anything else. There was zero reporting coming back on that. So it was realizing that it hadn’t been functioning for months, and then realizing that we had zero calls or complaints about it. Okay, so apparently this is not a thing.
What I always ensure now is that, regardless of what the feature is, we have visibility into who’s interacting with what, and what our expectation of that is. It’s not 100 percent of people are going to do everything. That’s not it. So what should adoption look like? What should growth look like? And then really be intentional about that, because cognitive load, especially with digital, is super important. If I have things that are barely being used, it’s different than something that’s being quietly leveraged all the time and just always works. That’s great. But if something is out there taking up space on a menu, on a dashboard, or something else, and it’s never getting used, let’s put that away and bring something else out that’s really going to help fill that space and truly bring value. So monitoring that on a regular basis has got to be a consistent thing. Just keeping an eye on that.
Alex: Yeah. In the early days of digital, you put out features and you’re like, oh, this is going to be great. And you didn’t have any tracking, so you had no idea. I remember rolling out PFM and nobody used it.
Zach: The only people who liked to use PFM were the ones who already had a system they really liked. Everybody’s going to have a budget now. No, they’re not. There are a lot of great ideas that just don’t make it. And that’s the part where you’ve got to be okay with that. You can’t get so caught up in, people should really like this. If you’ve put it in the right spot, if you told people about it the right way, and they still don’t care, it’s okay. Take it away.
Alex: Yeah. And we have limited space in apps for functionality, so having extra stuff that nobody uses is useless. I heard that your own kid goes to Reddit for money advice instead of a credit union. So if members are already getting answers somewhere else, how do you earn your way in? How do you convince them that the credit union is the right place for those discussions?
Zach: That goes back to building trust. You’ve got to be a place that people know they can go to. I think that my son’s most important draw, the highest value he gets out of hitting Reddit, is that these are actual people going through these actual things, and they’re just giving information. They’re not compensated for it. They have no skin in the game, really, but they’re often very wrong. He does it with his car too. He’ll say, I had this thing happen and I read it and it said I probably need a whole new engine. And it turned out there was nothing wrong with the car when it got looked at. So we’ll check things out, but let’s trust mechanics over Reddit. It’s cool. And let’s trust the people who know more than people on a platform that you don’t know.
So how do we do that? I think that draw is that there’s no judgment there. That’s really important for me, making sure that we have that relevant information going out so that we can show that we’re going to give you information that’s not self-serving. It’s not looking for you to give us more money. It’s going to be relevant, it’s going to be helpful. And over time, as we build that trust up, you know to come to us when you have those questions. It’ll either be available for you to self-serve, or you can talk with somebody, because you’re not going to feel afraid now to have that conversation. That’s what we’re really working toward, how we position that and tell that story the right way to build that trust over time, so that people will stop going to the corners of the internet and start coming here.
Alex: Yeah. Let’s switch it up a little bit. I’m going to take it to a lightning round. Just a few questions. Give me what’s top of mind, not necessarily having to do with banking. What’s your favorite city you’ve traveled to for work?
Zach: Salt Lake City.
Alex: Yeah, I lived there for a few years. It’s a great place. What’s a challenge you’re currently excited about tackling?
Zach: The marketing team reported to me as of two months ago. So really drilling in deeper on this has been fun.
Alex: Great. What are you reading right now?
Zach: I am reading Dungeon Crawler Carl. I’m in the eighth book, so I’m about to wrap that one up. I’m a sci-fi and fantasy nerd, and I decided to pick those up this year.
Alex: Yeah, I just started book 5, so.
Zach: It gets bleaker all the time, yeah.
Alex: Absolutely. But you sort of expect it. So if you weren’t in credit unions, what would you be doing?
Zach: Okay. Teaching or sociology?
Alex: Ah, I love it. My favorite college class was the sociology of sports. A lot of the other students thought it would be an easy class, and it was not. It was very tough.
Alex: Last question. What’s the one step forward you would challenge every credit union leader listening to this take after this episode?
Zach: That thing that you’re afraid to start because it’s not perfect yet, or you could make a mistake, just start by starting, learn from it, and then keep going forward.
Alex: That’s great. That’s words of wisdom, Zach. Thank you so much for your time, and love to see you in person sometime.
Zach: Sounds great, Alex. Look forward to it.
Alex: All right, thank you.
Zach: Yep, thank you.
