Since overhauling its online platform in April, Washington State Employees Credit Union (WSECU) members have reported a boost in user satisfaction.
“We do surveys of our members that have taken out loans and of members that have applied online, and we’re seeing that 90% of them are rating it as a low-effort experience,” said Ryan Brooks, director of digital lending at WSECU. “We have started to see our members tick up in their satisfaction around what they’re doing online.”
Prior to the site’s redesign, the Olympia, Wash.-based lender relied on third-party vendors to generate its digital presence. About three years ago, though, Brooks and his team changed the way they looked at the online member experience. “We really wanted our members to know more about us than just our name and the color palette,” he said.
Since then, WSECU brought many of its digital operations in-house to standardize the aesthetic and functionality across products and between devices. “Our lending experience and our website and our online banking all started to have the same look and feel, all the way down to behaviors,” Brooks said.
“If you have 50 different vendor solutions, the navigation bar is never going to be in the same place, so little things like that where our progress bars are consistent, the primary calls to action are consistent, the secondary calls to action are consistent,” he explained. “You start to build those patterns with members so that when they go into an experience that I believe has a lot of anxiety around it — like in lending — and it’s not a new experience.”
Since the April launch, WSECU has built workflows and processes around the core platform, Brooks said. One example is the preapproval workflow implemented in June. “It basically pops up and says, ‘Hey, you’re preapproved for this product. If you’d like to accept this, click here,’ and it bypasses all the application process that the member would normally have to go through,” he said.
