5 Ways Documents Destroy Member Value And How To Fight Back

5 Ways Documents Destroy Member Value And How To Fight Back

Originally published on Creditunions.com on September 29, 2014

How do you create value for your members? Examining the activities your employees spend time on reveals the ways your credit union and employees create value for your members; it also shows you areas that need to be improved.

Value creation includes investing in products and services, originating loans, expanding member service capabilities through training and hiring, and expanding member relationships by offering new products and services. However, low-value administrative tasks that do none of these things often monopolize employees and prevent them from spending more time on key value-creating activities. Eliminating or minimizing these wasteful, time-consuming tasks is essential to making sure that your employees are as productive as possible.

The goal of Bluepoint’s latest white paper, “Creating Value for Your Members: Is Your Document Imaging System Holding You Back?” (click here to download) is to examine the different activities that destroy value for members, identify the underlying causes, and highlight alternatives that fix these broken processes.

According to CUNA’s 2014 Technology Spending Survey, 51 percentof credit unions increased their technology budget this year, presenting the perfect opportunity to evaluate the collective systems and technology and tools that your employees rely upon to help them do their jobs better, faster, and with greater accuracy.

The following five pain points are incredibly common at many credit unions; they hamstring member service, curtail employee productivity, and, ultimately, are responsible for significant value destruction.

Lack Of Immediate Document Availability

Older imaging systems rely on centralized, or delayed scanning to import paper documents into their imaging system. These delays — which can range from days to weeks — cause workflow problems for employees who need access to the most current version as well as to members who suffer when their documents are not immediately available.

Lost And Stolen Documents

The impacton members of a credit union losing documents that usually contain confidential information is significant, as are the costs and inconvenience of recreating a lost document. Individual pages or entire documents can easily be lost during the scanning and indexing process as a result of human error.

Documents Scattered Among Disparate Systems

Knowing where to look for a document among all of these various systems (also known as “silos”) is a challenge for employees who face idiosyncratic filing structures that are frequently counterintuitive and confusing. Member requests that involved multiple types of documents would take time to complete, requiring valuable time from employees and causing delays for the member.

Unsupported Document Types

As more information enters credit unions through various digital channels, the proliferation of new, unsupported document types increases over time, without most credit unions even realizing its magnitude. Employees are forced to create inefficient, undocumented, time-consuming workarounds to accommodate these new types of documents.

Integration With Third-Party Systems

Credit unions are increasingly using third-party systems for key areas of their retail operations, including new member onboarding, loan origination, electronic signing of loan documents, and more. Older document imaging systems are built on obsolete technology platforms that are not built to easily integrate or communicate with these newer systems.

Credit unions need to look for problems they might not know they have, and understand the ways in which their current imaging systems are hurting employee productivity and member service.