Alliant Receives Excellence Award for Sales and Service Management

09/23/2019

Alliant Credit Union’s shift to a consultative service and coaching culture in the Member Care Center has been recognized with a 2019 Excellence Award for Sales and Service Management.

The award was presented by the CUNA Operations & Member Experience Council, a national network of more than 965 credit union operations and member experience professionals at the CUNA Operations & Member Experience Council’s 22nd annual conference held Sept. 11-14 in Chicago.

“Our new, more collaborative approach, along with employee coaching and education, easy access tools, incentive plans and quality assurance programs, have really set the foundation for the Member Care Center to support Alliant’s evolving digital strategy,” said Laura Wallace, Alliant vice president of member care.

Over the last five years, Alliant has positioned itself as a digital credit union. During that time, the phone channel has grown to be the “face” of the credit union as it experienced accelerated member and asset growth.

To build the culture to support this changing business model, Alliant integrated the Member Care Center’s sales and service teams. Leaders of the new, reorganized team adopted a coaching-centric culture. Member care team members moved to a more consultative approach, identifying and recommending products and services based on a caller’s specific needs.. Alliant developed a “service values” framework to guide consultants as they interact with members, established a structured three-week training program, and built an extensive internal knowledge base.

The results of the new consultative approach speak for themselves. In the last three years, phone channel consultants opened more than 7,000 new memberships and nearly 14,000 checking accounts. Additionally, Alliant’s contact center improvements have reduced call abandonment rates from 13 percent to 2.9 percent, and decreased average call wait times from 197 seconds to 43 seconds.

“Like everything we do at Alliant, the changes we made were in service of our members,” Wallace said. “Now that we have this solid foundation, we will continue pushing to improve our members’ experience and working with them as their trusted financial partner.”

For more information on the Excellence Awards or to view the entire list of winners, visit Council Awards Programs.

About Alliant
Alliant Credit Union is a not-for-profit financial cooperative with over 450,000 members and more than $11 billion in assets. Headquartered in Chicago and founded in 1935, Alliant is the largest credit union in Illinois and one of the largest credit unions in the United States. As a digital credit union, Alliant’s mission is to provide members consistently superior financial value while simplifying and enabling how people save, borrow and pay. Find out more at alliantcreditunion.org.

About CUNA Councils 
CUNA Councils is a member-led, collaborative community of credit union leaders providing vibrant peer interaction, new ideas and innovation to foster professional development for our members while advocating for the overall success of the credit union movement. There are seven CUNA Councils with a network of more than 7,000 credit union professionals. For more information, visit cunacouncils.org.

Media contact
Maggie Tomasek
PR & Content Strategist
Alliant Credit Union
773-462-3958
[email protected]