As another year comes to an end, you are likely taking time to reflect on your performance over the past 12 months. This allows your credit union to look for opportunities in the coming year and identify how best to use the resources at your disposal. One of the largest opportunities for growth is using your data to maximize the return on investment (ROI) on your analytical tools.
Teaching product and tool usage to end users promotes self-service and reduces the need for specialized individuals to create and maintain reports. Often, we see individuals in IT trying to balance everyday maintenance, desktop support, troubleshooting and updates/upgrades in addition to requests for pulling datapoints and reports coming from all areas of the business. By educating your team on how to use the analytical tools at your credit union, it disperses some of that effort and helps your end users get the data they need faster.
The idea of conserving time and money is not new; however, it is growing more important as you continue to add data and additional business systems. The simplest way to increase efficiencies is to automate as much as you can in the process of loading data and creating reports. Creating automation within your credit union will reduce the number of manual entry hours that go into data analysis. This not only gives your team time to focus on other priorities, but it reduces the risk of data entry errors which cuts down on time needed to validate that the data is accurate.
Understandably, these things are easier said than done. It takes a lot of time, effort and resources to build up your data warehouse and report repository, and all of this must be done while helping members, onboarding new staff, and executing credit union projects. With that in mind, keep reading for some inspiration on ways to use your data to make more informed decisions and boost ROI in the new year.
- Staffing
- Targeting transactional data to find out when your branches and call centers are the busiest allows you to staff them accordingly.
- Product Usage
- Targeting transactional data to see how frequently and what types of fees are being incurred on accounts enables you to identify members that could benefit from overdraft protection or a line of credit.
- Targeting transactional data to see if members have outgoing payments to credit card companies such as American Express or automotive companies such as Ford Credit identifies members that could transfer their balances to your institution’s products instead.
- ATM Locations
- Targeting transactions made at various ATM locations (or by zip code) helps evaluate if there is enough branch presence in the area or if an added location could increase membership.
- Marketing Campaigns
- Targeting account data can ensure your marketing teams are using the correct mail and email addresses so that paper mail is not wasted and emails do not bounce.