Credit Human Federal Credit Union
How a leading credit union uses RingCentral Video and Contact Center to better serve its 250,000 members
297
requirements for their unified communications platform evaluation—and RingCentral met every one
$300+
saved per agent now that the support team no longer needs desk phones
1
video conference platform for all employees, consolidating 4 different apps prior to RingCentral
We’re using RingCentral for everything now—our phones, our contact center operations, audio and video conferences, team messaging, even fax. It’s great to finally have all these communication services integrated with each other and under a single partner’s solution.
Winston Cook
Department Manager, Member Service Center
A financial partner to underserved populations for decades
Americans unable to secure traditional bank accounts or loans can easily find themselves exploited. Check-cashing businesses often charge upwards of 10% of a check’s value, and payday loans consume more than a third of the average borrower’s paycheck. Fortunately, for thousands of underserved people, there’s Credit Human Federal Credit Union.
A not-for-profit, 100% member-owned cooperative, Credit Human offers its members a full range of financial solutions: checking and savings accounts, credit cards, loans, and investment planning services. But perhaps the greatest source of pride for Credit Human’s employees is the work they’ve done to help thousands of their members build “financial slack”—a monetary cushion that helps reduce the enormous amount of daily stress caused by financial instability.
Founded in 1935, Credit Human’s reputation for outstanding service and competitive lending rates helped the organization grow well beyond its Texas roots. Today, Credit Human also has loan origination offices in Washington, Colorado, North Carolina, and Vermont, and serves 250,000 members all over the country.
But with that level of geographic expansion, and a rapidly growing member roster, Credit Human found its 10-year-old telephony infrastructure falling short.
INDUSTRY
Financial services
HQ
San Antonio, TX
YEAR FOUNDED
1935
EMPLOYEES
800
Single points of failure, multiple points of frustration
IT Manager Justin Collins recalls the increasing challenges that Credit Human’s aging phone system caused the organization. “We had a lot of technical issues, largely because it was set up with several points of failure,” he says. “And because the system was so old, it was difficult to find people with expertise on it, even within the IT consulting firm that sold it to us.”
The system was also such a challenge to operate, Justin explains, that even simple tasks were time-consuming and usually required back and forth with the vendor. “There were no easy, self-serve features anywhere in this system,” he says. “If we wanted to change admin privileges, we needed help. If we wanted to generate a simple report, we needed help.”
Winston Cook, the Department Manager for Credit Human’s Member Service Center, notes that his team used the phone system for its contact center—and they had similar challenges. “Our managers didn’t have the control they needed in the system, such as the ability to quickly add or edit a skill. Even updating the greetings on our support lines took a lot of effort.”
Our list of must-haves for a unified communications solution grew to 297 items, and we eliminated any vendor that couldn’t support even one of them. That basically cleared the field. But to our astonishment, RingCentral met every single requirement.
Winston Cook
Department Manager, Member Service Center
From an outdated phone system to a unified communications environment
When they rolled out RingCentral, Credit Human went from struggling to maintain reliable phone service, to improving every aspect of the staff’s IT communications environment.
With RingEX (Message, Video, Phone), RingCentral Contact Center, and RingCentral Fax, Credit Human’s employees have a full range of cloud communication services—phone, fax, team messaging, audio conferencing, video conferencing, and contact center management—which they can access from any device. And as Justin and Winston explain, the organization is using this new platform to create significant operational improvements.
Improving operations with RingCentral Video and RingCentral Rooms
Before RingCentral, Justin explains, Credit Human’s distributed staff used several different online meeting platforms, and the conference rooms in the company’s offices were all set up with different AV equipment. “We always struggled scheduling and running meetings, because we weren’t using a consistent platform.”
But as Justin points out “RingCentral Video has been great for maintaining that sense of team, especially during the lockdowns when we were all remote. And now that some of us are coming back into the office, having RingCentral Rooms is also great to make everyone’s conference room experience consistent and ensure we can always include anyone, anywhere, in our meetings.”
I’ve heard from several of our offices that they feel more connected to the company now that we’re using RingCentral Video for most of our meetings. Just being able to see each other on a regular basis makes a huge difference.
Justin Collins
IT Manager
Improving operations with RingCentral Contact Center
As Winston explains, the Member Service Center is finding several ways to improve workflows and service quality with RingCentral Contact Center. “From an administrative standpoint, Contact Center is so easy to use that we can easily make changes on the fly ourselves. If we’re getting a lot of calls on a particular topic, we can create a skill in Contact Center for that right away or, if it already exists, we can quickly add more agents to cover it.”
And as Winston also points out, his managers are leveraging RingCentral’s detailed reporting to gain visibility and business intelligence. “We’re learning a lot from monitoring hold time—not only how long before an agent picks up a call but also how long they place a member on hold if they need to call another department to ask a question. If hold times seem high, we can investigate if the issue is agent training, or the other department being slow to answer.”
Improving operations with RingCentral Team Messaging
In fact, for those moments when a support agent can’t reach another department, Winston’s team leverages another tool in the RingCentral platform. “Let’s say a member calls in with a fraud issue. Our Contact Center agent tries to transfer the call, but the fraud department isn’t answering. The agent can just pull up the RingCentral Team Messaging app and send a message to the Fraud group, which everyone in that department will see right away.”
When you’re taking more than 44,000 member calls each month, you need an outstanding Contact Center solution, one that’s easy to use, easy to administer, and gives you every piece of functionality you can think of. We found that with RingCentral Contact Center.
Winston Cook
Department Manager, Member Service Center