When Everyone Owns The Member Experience, No One Does

Member experience doesn’t fall apart because teams don’t care; it breaks when no one owns the decisions that cut across them. Avoiding that reality is shaping the member journey at FORUM Credit Union ($2.3B, Fishers, IN).

According to Andrew Spirrison, FORUM’s chief member experience officer since February 2023, member experience used to mean the quality of front-line interactions but now includes onboarding, digital, service, retention, and more. A role that owns member experience today must be integrated across the organization’s operations and channels.

“The job is less about coaching tellers and more about partnering with teams across the credit union so the journey feels consistent end to end,” Spirrison says.

Consequently, member experience leaders must navigate a complex environment that requires them to connect decisions made in separate parts of the organization.

Shared Ownership, Fractured Experience

Distributed ownership can work, but complexity makes it harder, especially as more channels and systems shape the member journey in parallel rather than sequence.

It wasn’t too long ago that digital channels and capabilities were an add-on. Today, digital serves as the experience and expectation for most members, Spirrison says. As more teams influence a single journey, the risk rises that their efforts drift apart without clear coordination. Such fragmentation often happens quietly, as each team improves its own performance while unintentionally creating friction elsewhere in the experience.

“Without one clear owner — or small group of owners — overseeing the whole journey, each team can optimize their own piece while the end-to-end experience breaks down,” Spirrison says.

In effect, local gains can produce global inconsistencies when no one is accountable for stitching together digital, branch, payments, and service into a coherent whole.

The Tradeoffs No One Owns

As complexity grows, so do the number of decisions that don’t belong to any single team, particularly those that require balancing competing priorities.

“Many decisions involve tradeoffs,” Spirrison says. “Speed versus risk, personalization versus privacy, and cost versus experience.”

Without a clear owner, those decisions tend to stall or default to the safest path rather than the best one for members. In some scenarios, ambiguity in ownership doesn’t just delay progress but can actively degrade outcomes across both service and compliance. The result is slower execution and missed opportunities, even when every team is acting with the member in mind.

“When nobody clearly owns the decision, it can get lost in translation and result in a negative member and regulatory experience,” Spirrison says.

Requirements For Effective Shared Ownership

FORUM’s experience suggests shared ownership works best when paired with clear accountability, particularly around decisions that cut across organizational boundaries. A credit union can distribute responsibilities, but it also must define accountability for the end-to-end experience if it wants consistency across channels.

“Someone has to own the journey,” Spirrison says.

That clarity extends beyond structure into how the credit union makes, measures, and reinforces decisions through systems and data. Analytics play a big role here, and FORUM deploys three distinct streams — journey analytics, behavioral data, and real-time feedback loops.

• Journey Analytics — Using end-to-end experience data across a prioritized set of member journeys, including account opening and depository products, lending, and self-service account maintenance. “We employ this at FORUM across multiple business channels — deriving a suite of informational dashboards that are leveraged for key service, product, and delivery channel decision-making,” Spirrison says.
• Behavioral Data — Spotting patterns that drive personalization and flagging where members get stuck or drop off. “This defines our new partnership and implementation of a true digital and in-branch lending and new account experience,” Spirrison says. “This includes interactive journey reporting to promptly detect and address journey bottlenecks.”
• Real-Time Feedback Loops — Using survey results, complaints, abandonment, decisioning signals, and more to surface and address issues while they still matter. “Similar to above plus acting on what you are hearing and seeing while it still matters,” Spirrison says.

The veteran experience and retail manager adds that the scorecard has grown beyond Net Promoter Score to include effort scores, digital adoption, new account application pull-through success rate, churn risk, active checking percentages, and overall membership and account lifetime value.

Altogether, he says, this comprehensive tracking of end-to-end experience data across a prioritized set of member journeys helps teams align around shared outcomes rather than isolated metrics and makes it easier to detect fragmentation.

What’s Next For MX?

Looking ahead, member experience leadership roles are set to continue to expand as member expectations rise and competition broadens beyond traditional peers into fintechs and digital-first platforms. Spirrison points to enhanced AI service and personalization presented in a localized, member-centric way as one of several areas shaping how member experience will evolve in the near future.

At the same time, MX leadership roles are becoming more proactive, focused on anticipating needs rather than reacting to them after friction appears. Such an approach can solve problems before members notice them.

Of course, as visibility increases, the experience function is also integrating more deeply into strategy and governance, with clearer ties to growth. Ultimately, the trajectory reflects a broader change in how credit unions think about member experience as a function of leadership and execution.

“The role has moved from ‘make service better’ to ‘design and run the member experience as a growth engine,’” Spirrison says.

That shift reinforces the central idea that ownership, not just intent, determines whether a distributed model delivers consistency or fragmentation.

“Some institutions can spread CMXO responsibilities across leaders and still make it work,” Spirrison says. “But when there is no one accountable owner, the common failure mode is fragmentation: handoffs get messy, decisions slow down, and accountability blurs.”

Instead, he says, credit unions that treat the member experience as a true cross-functional strategy will move faster while remaining more consistent. That’s when managing the member journey becomes less about owning service and more about making everything members and employees touch feel connected.