When Kevin Miller stepped in as CEO of Travis Credit Union ($5.4B, Vacaville, CA) in April 2022, the contact center was under pressure. Long wait times, tech hiccups, and member frustration were eroding trust and straining staff capacity. There was no sole culprit, says Miller. Rather, it was a mix of post-pandemic staffing struggles, along with outdated processes.
In less than one year, everything changed.
Rather than pretending there wasn’t a problem or talking around it, Miller’s team moved to tackle the issue head-on. It met with leaders across different teams, not just the contact center, to effectively shift pain points from an “I” to a “we” problem. The executive team and contact center leadership also met weekly to focus on performance issues, challenges, and barriers that were leading to poor performance. And, all leaders were candid about the issue in companywide town halls, emphasizing that this wasn’t about the performance of individual employees.
“Often in these situations, you need to have an honest dialogue about the state of things while not hurting the spirit of the people trying hard to do a great job,” Miller says. “I framed it as, ‘This isn’t about the contact center team, this is a leadership issue.’ And that, ultimately, is my responsibility.”
Ask The Questions
3 Questions
When Travis Credit Union CEO Kevin Miller approaches a business decision, he gathers data by asking people the same three questions:
- What’s going well?
- What’s not going well?
- If I had a magic wand, what’s one thing you’d change about the organization?
To determine what needed to be fixed and how to move forward most effectively, Miller and his team conducted roughly 45 interviews over 30 days. Those conversations revealed the challenges around the contact center, though not all interviews were with call center employees.
Miller says it’s common when encountering problems like this to simply expect the team in charge to figure out a solution on its own. But that might not be practical or even feasible.
“At some point you can’t just delegate it out,” the CEO says. “You’ve got to be directly involved and enable it to get fixed.”
But Miller doesn’t stop there. He says leaders don’t arrive at solutions just by showing up, they must dig in to learn what’s really broken.
“We sat there and worked through the grind,” he says. “‘We said, ‘We think these two things are problems. How easy are they to fix? Who can own that?’”
Although Miller was aiming to fix the contact center — which at the time was posting average wait times of 45 minutes — he now applies that approach to all business decisions.
“I ask everybody the same three questions: What’s going well, what’s not going well, and if I had a magic wand, what’s one thing you’d change about the organization,” he says.
According to Miller, those three questions yield a plethora of data that points to what’s top of mind.
“That’s your starting point,” he says.
Staff Up, Skill Up, Show Up
After going straight to the internal subject experts and asking for honest feedback, the team compiled and anonymized their answers to share with the board chair and Miller’s direct reports.
“What came about in my first year with the organization was exorbitantly long average wait times,” Miller says. “It wasn’t intentional, but it was placing an extraordinary amount of stress on the organization. Then the question becomes what to do about it?”
With that in mind, Miller turned to a mantra he learned from a leader earlier in his career: Be hard on the problem, not the people.
Travis leaders determined more staffing could help mitigate the issues occurring within the call center. Unfortunately, the obvious answer to this — increase call center staffing — was made more complicated in a post-COVID hiring environment in which labor pools were shrinking, competition for talent was increasing, and employee expectations were evolving.
The credit union doubled its recruitment for contact center roles and brought in employees from other departments to field calls as a stopgap measure.
Along with boosting staffing, Travis also modified its compensation model to encourage retention and pushed leaders to join employees on the floor to gain real-time insight and check in on morale. It also reimagined the learning and onboarding experience, equipping new agents with the tools, context, and confidence to succeed from day one.
“We looked at recruiting, compensation, the learning agenda for contact center agents, and onboarding,” Miller says. “All of that got re-tooled in under a year, driven by the voice of the team member.”
Clear Access And Answers
Call center conversations also revealed challenges around which employees could speak with vendors. The primary user — in this case, the contact center — often has that permission, but an entirely different department might reserve that right based on technology, security, or other factors. And that muddies the water.
“In this case, the person running the contact center was not allowed to talk directly to the contact center vendor,” Miller says. “That lasted about a week or two.”
The interviews also helped illuminate issues around the types of calls employees took, how those were routed, and whether agents were prepared for the call. Addressing the core of the problem here meant re-emphasizing the fundamentals for contact center staff and ensuring team members had the scripts and tools necessary for success.
“We get more than 20,000 calls per month,” Miller says. “Those little things add up. They sound super boring, but they really matter.”
Results And Lessons Learned
These and other changes helped the Travis team reduce wait times by 50% within six months and 90% within a year. Today, wait times are within the industry average.
The big takeaway for credit unions of all sizes, Miller says, is to simply enable teams to do their jobs in the most effective and efficient ways possible.
“If something isn’t going well — not like a little oops, but everyone agrees it’s stuck — your obligation as a leader, regardless of title, is to get involved to help make it better,” the CEO says. “Get a group of people to agree on what the problem is and the three things you think caused it or could fix it. Nothing we did was rocket science.”
It’s easy to look for a silver bullet, Miller concludes, but such a simple solution doesn’t exist. The real work comes from sitting down, understanding the problem, and taking the necessary steps to fix it.