Innovation Credit Union meets the needs of clients despite COVID-19 challenges

A transition into technology over the past number of years was one of the adaptive strategies utilized by Innovation Credit Union to meet the needs of their members during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Innovation Credit Union CEO Dan Johnson said the rapidly changing realities of the pandemic created unprecedented challenges for Innovation across their 24 locations across the western portion of Saskatchewan.

“For a number of years we’ve been really focussed on having the ability for our staff to work anywhere, so we’ve equipped them with the technology, the computers,” Johnson said during a recent phone interview. “In doing that I think it prepared us really well for the ability to act quickly with respect to the pandemic. So when we needed to get people into an environment where they weren’t in high concentration, practice distancing and working from home.”

”We had the ability to do that right off the bat, so we had about 60 per cent of our over 250 staff work from home basically the week that we declared that we have a pandemic that we need to address. And I think that really helped because we weren’t scrambling around trying to find the technology.”

As an essential service that was permitted to be open in some fashion during the pandemic, they wanted to do their best to ensure there was some level of service happening for their 55,000 members despite the COVID-19 precautions. They decided to utilize seven branches for in person appointments so as to not disrupt the membership too much.

“Even though at one point we had all our locations ‘closed’, they were by appointment. So it wasn’t like we were fully closed. So if someone came to our buildings, our advice centres, and needed something, we would make it happen.”

Throughout the pandemic, Innovation followed the phases of the public health restrictions and created an environment to change their service delivery. Now that the phases have started to become more relaxed they are beginning to reverse the service delivery restrictions.

Johnson saluted their members for their cooperation throughout the new normal of banking.

“The members were amazing. They were very accommodating and they understood. So it seemed to work out well to today where we’re back to the same hours we were PRE-COVID. In fact we actually have better hours because we’ve kept our Call Centre hours in the more expanded times, especially on the weekends.”

He reflected that their Call Centre did significantly increased volumes during the pandemic.

“As we had less people coming into our Advice Centres, we started to see more come through the Call Centre. So we had about a nine per cent increase when you look at the overall volumes compared to last year at this time. And so we see about 10,000 to 12,000 calls a month go through our Call Centre so we’ve seen some increase.”

“But one of the things that we did two or three years ago, we invested in technology to allow all of our team, all of our staff, all of our employees, the ability to be a part of a Call Centre. So rather than having just say 20-25 people in our Call Centre on the second floor in Swift Current, we have technology that hunts around all 24 locations and looks for someone that has the ability to serve a member. So during the COVID times it was pretty easy, especially when we had 60 per cent of our locations not open, we still had access to that talent. And all those who were working from home we had access to that talent. So our Call Centre numbers, even though they increased, our average wait time in any given day was right around 20 seconds. That was pretty astonishing to us because you hear so many of these other stories when you’re phoning just an airline at it takes a couple of hours.”

“We were pretty happy with that technology, that ability to leverage talent no matter where you were in our roster of locations.”

Another positive that came out of the changed service delivery was an increase in outreach to their members.

“We had a bit more time in that less people were coming into our locations, so we increased our pro-active outreach. Sometimes it was just a quick call to one of our members to say ‘Hey, how are things going? Do you need anything?’

In other calls to their members they were able to share details on the various government programs that were being delivered during the pandemic.

“We basically doubled the amount of pro-active calls that we typically make,” noting that in all of 2019 they had conducted 10,000 to 12,000 calls to support members and during the first half of this year they reached 33,000.

“Our team has been amazing as far as focussing on what our communities need and what our members need.”

Johnson admitted that he has been impressed with all levels of government during the pandemic, and all banks and Credit Unions have been working to make sure Canadians get through this pandemic as a collective country. However, there are a few ways that Credit Unions have been set apart from the big banks.

“When it comes to non pandemic times, but especially during pandemic times, usually purpose driven organizations like us tend to do better in these times. I’ve really noted that. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard our staff say ‘what can we do for our members? How can we simply things? They have all these other stresses, lets take that stress off the table for them.’ So that focus that we’ve always had on members that really was apparent during the, and I guess we’re still in it, during the COVID times.”

Financially, Credit Union members did take advantage of deferral programs in order to ease the financial challenges many people were facing when businesses closed down during COVID.

“If you look at overall from a consumer perspective about 7.1 per cent of our members took advantage of the deferral programs offered by the government. That’s pretty substantial. It was a bit more with our commercial members, about 21 to 22 per cent of our overall commercial portfolio took advantage of some of those deferral programs. The agriculture side not so much, in and around one to two per cent of our agriculture members - they didn’t necessarily qualify or need the assistance from the government so that was a bit lower for sure.”

overall, the skip a payment, had about $312 million in skip a payment amounts through the first part of the year.

“It’s been really a mixed bag depending on what portfolio you’re look at, but we really tried to make it easy for our members to do that.”

Now that more and more businesses and services are resuming, Innovation is also resuming services while still carefully following the guidance set out by public health officials.

“For our organization it’s really about making sure that we’re still working with our members, asking if they need any help, providing any advice or guidance. But I think we’re starting to see people consume again and get back to work. Sometimes when you’re pent up that long there’s some pent up desire to spend and buy, so we’re starting to see some of that. We hope that happens. The economy would really benefit from people being more active again and getting things rolling in a number of aspects.”

Johnson extended his sincere appreciation to their members, their board and their staff for their efforts during these unprecedented times.

“I think from a corporate prospective there was some really good support from our members, good support from our board. As an example, right off the bat we said there was going to be no layoffs. And we purposely hired more summer students than we typically do. We actually provided a premium on wages for those on the front line. So those sort of things were also good additions to our thinking around dealing with this. Again, the members have been so accommodating. Without that flexibility and accommodation it would be tougher to make those decisions. So that was some of the positive components to us being able to deal with this. We’ve never been more financially strong, more solid. We’ve been able to leverage that multi-year success to be able to cope through these things. We’ll see how things go over the next few years. I’m sure there’ll be different numbers coming out of our annual reports just to deal with some of the things that might be by-products of this. But so far it’s been really good for us as far as being able to support those different programs.”

“There’s a lot of conversation about front line workers. You think of all the front line workers, whether its grocery or medical or all other sectors. But Innovation also had a couple of hundred front line workers that continued to work through this, and we’ve done things to keep them safe, but you can’t thank that group enough for their dedication through these delicate times, because sometimes they were pretty delicate and unknown. So I just want to give a big thanks to that group as well.”