As part of the local community, credit unions can really set themselves apart with customer service. Banks, especially large ones, can be impersonal. After all, the customer is one of tens of millions at the larger banks, and those banks make their money in other ways, so individuals are not top priority. As part of the community, you are there as much to support and serve your customers as to make money.

With the 360-degree view, along with effectively tracking the many ways your customers interact with you, you can be better equipped to have a more personal relationship with them. You know the community, which means you better understand them and their needs, but you need to be able to address their questions and concerns. You need to communicate with them regularly and effectively to keep them informed of new opportunities, changes, and more with targeted emails, phone calls, and social media posts.

You must provide just as many opportunities for them to talk to you. Communication goes both ways, and a customer who doesn’t feel listened to is an unhappy one; a customer who feels informed and listened to and understood is a loyal one. A CRM solution can assist with all these efforts by providing you with information about your customer–even down to their birthday, which gives you an opportunity to reach out, help you track your interactions with them, and even give you reminders of when and how to connect with them. A modern CRM solution will also integrate with your Outlook or other productivity tools, making it easier to communicate without losing track of what you’re doing and without forcing you to work in two (or more) separate systems to get the job done.

Another area in which you can improve customer services is speed. People want things fast, and if you make them wait, they’ll go somewhere else. A modern CRM will equip you to stay on top of correspondence and be speedy with responses. Even before an issue is resolved, the customer will feel valued because of how quickly you respond.

And finally, today’s customers want self-service options. Modern CRMs offer capabilities that allow you to provide portals, apps, and other tools and services that provide those self-service options, which make customers happy but also free up your peoples’ time to serve customers in other ways.

Small businesses are the backbone of any community, and they always have unique struggles. They really struggled during COVID; McKinsey reported that small businesses provided nearly half of all private-sector jobs in the U.S. but accounted for 54 percent of the jobs that were most vulnerable during the pandemic.

Although much of this business has come back, those who survived are still facing challenges and need support which most big banks don’t want to deal with. To help small businesses thrive now, credit unions have the opportunity to support the community by supporting its businesses in the form of attractive interest rates, credit cards that give incentives to members that patronize local businesses, and more.