Build a Community
Digital Intelligence Is About Ideas: The More The Better
A critical factor in the success of digital intelligence is the range, depth, and quality of the digital knowledge contained in the database. A further challenge is the need to hit the ground running with a database that doesn't disappoint the end user. Can we really prove to the user that this is a valuable resource the very first time they give it a spin? Will members continue to use these products once we make the investment? Will employees search for answers in a digital network in a way that improves service quality and helps credit unions change more quickly? In short, will the money we invest in creating, building and maintaining digital intelligence give us a fair return?
Gaining Scale
As credit unions, it is often difficult to gain the scale necessary to effectively understand what credit union members want from their financial service provider. There is no credit union that has a single network or scale that competes with today's large regional and national banks. How can we as credit unions gain the advantage over our competitors when it comes to gathering ideas, building networks that answer member needs, and building innovative new organizations?
We can cooperate. We can build an effective community of credit unions exchanging best practices, business concepts, and member trends that help us all respond more quickly to the marketplace. Using a product like AnswerBook where the database is focused on the voice of the member means your organization must appear to have your finger on the pulse of what the general marketplace wants to know, and then express it in a way that says your products meet that need. If any organization acts alone, how long with it take to have a rich offering, and what will the cost be of acting independently?
In other words, what can we learn from each other, and how can we assure each other's success as we all build stronger organizations? We need a community to act with power and to innovate to win.
See how CU*Answers is developing a credit union community for Answer Book.
Goals for a Community
Users share public and private knowledge items among community participants.
- Staff across the community can sign up to be made available in a common pool of resources that can be called upon by any community member using expanded “find expert” functionality. I see this primarily being used to deal with internal issues rather than handling member inquiries.
- Pooling of resources to allow creation of personal finance content that would be included in knowledge packs and pushed out to all community members that participated in paying for the content. Inclusion in the CU’s individual knowledge base allow for very tight integration with their Web site and complete control over how the information is cross-referenced to products and services and extended to all resources (testing, Web site, Help Desk, Intranets, 3rd party, online help).
- User groups focused on:
- Common things like best practices in getting started, evolving and optimizing use of the system.
- How to best market channel to members – what, when, were and how. Common marketing plans including collateral could be developed for individual branding as appropriate. Focus would be to jointly create marketing plan and evolve it based on real-world results.
- Same thing as previous item but focused on leveraging the rich member information naturally captured during the support process to create and evolve target marketing campaigns to members.
- Surveys of members of CUs in community and sharing of results among community members.
