Case Study: Member-Friendly Focus Makes Website Redesign a Success

For their website redesign, Call FCU centered on the user experience when deciding to add new resources and features that improved member satisfaction and increased usage.

When Call Federal Credit Union ($250 million in Richmond, VA) decided to redesign their website last year, they were not content to end up with just an attractive site. Instead, they wanted to create a site with content so compelling that members would set it as the home page in their browser.

Give the Website a Personal Touch
Kelley Parks, the Marketing Specialist at Call FCU, discussed the challenge of overcoming the traditionally cold, boring feel of most financial services websites during a Callahan webinar.It was important to us for our web design to give that credit union personal touch, she said. We really wanted to carry the brand that warm friendly experience online.

To achieve that goal, the site template was designed to include pictures of people on the top of every page. Each page shows different photos with captions that link to related information about products and services the credit union offers.

Rather than use the standard stock images that are shown so often on the web, Call decided to personalize their site by also including credit union employees and members in the photo rotation.

To mirror the exceptional customer service that members could find in the branches, Call also included a Live Chat feature on all of their web pages that would enable a member to instantly connect with a credit union employee if they hadquestions or needed more information (see button on the left side of the image above). The chat feature was very well-received by members, and it provides a way for members who encounter difficulty to get help at the moment they need it instead ofhaving to stop and use a telephone to call the credit union. Common member inquiries include forgotten home banking passwords or requests for account balances.

Help Members Access Information They Want
Call recognized that in order to achieve their goal of increasing member usage of the site, they needed to provide quick, intuitive ways to access the information that their members wantedto find online. After doing some research, they found out that their members wanted more information than what was currently on the site much more. Some of what they wanted was more in-depth information related to financial decisions, suchas auto buying resources or financial calculators. But there was also a demand for non-financial information such as news, weather, and horoscopes.

Call added a large amount of this additional content to their site using partnerships and third party providers and made it easily accessible from their homepage. The My Information Center contains easy-to-use links to sections that contain up-to-date News, Weather, Stock Reports, Financial Information, and much more.

The Success of the Changes

How did the members react to the new site? During the webinar (EVENT=4), Parks shared a comparison of the old and new site that illustrated the success of the changes. In the month after the launch, visits to the site were up 28%. The number of Home Bankingusers increased 34% in a six-month period. And the Live Chat feature was used by about 15 members per day during the period immediately following the launch of the new site. Plus, the website now echoed the offline brand of Call FCU much better thanbefore.

To hear more examples of how credit unions have changed their website to improve the member experience, attend our upcoming webinar on Improving the Usability of Your Web Site Through Better Design brought to you by Callahan & Associates and sponsored by Digital Insight.

April 13, 2015

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