In less than a year, Advantis had converted from their old system to Alkami and the institution went live in January 2015. With a new platform in place, the leadership team at Advantis had lofty goals and visions for what they wanted to accomplish. However, they knew if they were going to fully capitalize on what Alkami had to offer and deliver a superior member experience, they would have to increase the amount of time and attention they were spending internally on the credit union’s online banking strategy. 

Kevin said, “Leadership at the credit union knew that we needed to apply more focus on digital banking and the partnership with Alkami. They wanted a dedicated person to manage this initiative and the relationship. That’s when I took on the role of eBanking Support Analyst and really started digging into the experience we were providing our members.” Kevin wasted no time before he began delving into the wealth of member feedback Advantis had captured over the years. “We are very big on member feedback and we go out of our way to try to get as much of it as we can. So, I spent a lot of time analyzing the results for our online banking surveys. One issue that quickly surfaced was that our members were still having difficulty finding and getting to the information they needed. The user experience could still be optimized.”

After seeing these results, Kevin remembers thinking, “We are so lucky that we converted to Alkami when we did. With our old system we would be stuck. We couldn’t do anything based on this feedback. But because Alkami’s platform is so versatile, we can actually do something about it.” That’s when Kevin started thinking about formalizing a process for leveraging member feedback to guide user experience design. Kevin knew he didn’t have the resources or expertise to make this happen, so he immediately reached out to Alkami. He was pleased to discover that Alkami had a UX Design and Development Team on staff. “Fortunately for us, I learned that Alkami was fully committed to user-centered design and they had this expertise in house.”

That’s when Crystal Lacuone, the Advantis account manager at Alkami, introduced Kevin to Alkami’s user experience leader. “When I first met her, it was apparent that she knew what she was doing. She had a wealth of experience in this area and quickly explained how proper user-testing and design should be done.” After that meeting, Kevin was impressed and ready to move forward. However, there was another step in the process that had to come first. Kevin said, “It became obvious that our executives should be involved in this initiative. After all, we were going to provide a third-party vendor with direct access to our members. That’s a pretty big deal. We also didn’t want to start something that we couldn’t finish. That meant we needed to secure executive-level commitment before we even got started.”

So, Kevin and Alkami began documenting their strategy and making arrangements to present the game plan to the leadership team. “I had never been through a process like this. What was I going to do? Walk into our executives and say, hey, this is going to be great, but please don’t ask me any questions that I can’t answer,” Kevin said as he reflected back on this important phase of his journey.

“That’s when Alkami’s user experience leader came to rescue. With her extensive experience, she was able to explain our plan to the executive team in a simple and convincing way. A way that ensured that they could trust me and the Alkami team with the process. Helping our leadership team understand the plan was critical to getting the buy-in we needed.”

After meeting with the leadership team, Kevin and Alkami got the green light to proceed and immediately went to work. The first step was to define the ideal profile of members who Advantis wanted to participate in the user experience testing process. “This was a challenge considering we were starting with our 73,000-plus membership base. However, we quickly narrowed down our target members based on age, user activity level, features utilized, and historical member feedback.” With a target member list in place, Alkami developed a new digital banking survey designed to capture specific feedback about the current user experience. After analyzing the findings from those surveys, Alkami’s user experience team set up one-on-one phone interviews with members who responded to capture even more insights that could guide the design process. Kevin recalls, “She was probably one of the best interviewers I’d ever met. She knew exactly what questions to ask and how to surface actionable user experience insights. Through those interviews, we recruited 10-15 members who were willing to participate in live, on-site user testing sessions. That’s when the real work began.”