How First Alliance Credit Union Solves Its Staffing Crunch While Driving Loan Growth

First Alliance Credit Union ($288.1M, Stewartville, MN) has raised the bar on member service by shrinking branch staff and relying heavily on a combination of high-tech and high-touch.

The change is the result of the Gopher State cooperative shifting its focus from transactions to interactions and moving away from tellers to universal employees, what it terms “member experience advisors.”

The new operational model also relies heavily on interactive teller machines, or what the credit union calls “Advisor Supported Kiosks” (ASK). It deployed the first four ITMs — two in the branch and two drive-ups — at a newly built branch in July 2020. Now, it has 21 in place at five branches and has plans to add them to a sixth location First Alliance acquired in a recent merger.

Members can now conduct routine transactions through the kiosks but still must see a live teller to sort coins, make large business member deposits, and obtain a cashier’s check. The credit union staffs ITMs with remote workers; meanwhile, in-branch staff greets members, helps members with the ITMs, and focuses on lending.

“Before going with the kiosks, we had universal agents in the branches for several years,” says David Schouten, First Alliance’s senior vice president of IT, marketing, and compliance. “What we found with that model is some staff focused on transactions and weren’t very good at sales, or we had salespeople who weren’t very good at transactions. Both groups were frustrated, and it never quite worked out. We wanted our branch staff to focus on interactions, not transactions, and we knew the only way to do this was to get the transactions out of the picture.”

The new focus on value-added tasks like selling products and services around life events has produced immediate results.

“With the first branch we deployed in this manner, our loan volume triple compared to other traditional branches,” Schouten says. “It quickly justified itself.”

1 Player-Coach Advisor For Every 2 Branches

The staffing at First Alliance now includes one lead advisor per two branches. The lead advisor plays more of a player-coach role than that of a full-time manager. There’s also a manager in charge of the branch lead advisors.

As for the ITMs, there’s a team of five advisors working remotely to help members who need more than the self-service functions. One of the five serves as the lead for that team.

“We have all the routine transactions at five of our six branches handled by five people,” Schouten says. “That number used to be triple what it is today. Who would have thought even five years ago that a teller could ever work from home?”

Of course, five years ago no one was thinking about a global pandemic just over the horizon.

A 4-Year Process That Became 12 Months

Schouten says the credit union originally created this new staffing model to address chronic turnover and staffing shortages the cooperative — like so many others — had been fighting against, and it was expecting the transition to be a four-year process.

COVID-19 changed that.

“With the pandemic and our lobbies closed, we decided to accelerate this to 12 months,” Schouten says. “The kiosks were a great way to safely re-open our lobbies sooner than expected.”

Making The Most Of New People And New Technology

The kiosks also were a way to maximize the credit union’s investment in its core technology. First Alliance bought the ITMs from Fiserv as part of the cooperative’s conversion to the Portico core processing platform.

“It was a pilot integration program for that particular core,” Schouten says.

The learning process for all these changes included developing a new kind of front-line employee.

“In the past, we did a lot more looking to make sure people we hired were math-focused and had the attention to detail needed for conventional teller work,” Schouten says. “That’s not what we’re doing now.”

According to Schouten, people who have succeeded in the hospitality industry and are looking for better opportunities have been good hires for the new in-branch roles, but that’s not all.

“We look for tech-savvy, sales-focused individuals,” the First Alliance executive says. “They have to have confidence in the model, and we find people who are generally more tech-savvy get it quite easily. They have to be gregarious as well. It is very important to greet every member as they walk in the branch, even if they just need to use the kiosk.”

The credit union has changed its training, too. New member experience advisors undergo a two- to six-month training process. During that time, they learn about lending and deposit products, account opening, shepherding members through those processes, and identifying what members need to make the most of the ITMs available to them inside and outside the branch. The change in skills has prompted the credit union to offer a higher starting pay, but the results are worth it, Schouten says.

“Everyone saw how this would help us hire people who would stay and grow with us. We could get away from the constant turnover and never-ending need to find and hire new people on the teller line.”

On Board From The Beginning

Schouten attributes the new staffing model’s success to the internal buy-in across the enterprise. According to the First Alliance SVP and CIO, it was vital to have everyone on board and the transition be driven by branch operations as much as by IT. Employees even had input on the design of the workflow for both the ITMs and what used to be the teller line.

“Everyone saw how this would help us hire people who would stay and grow with us,” Schouten says. “We could get away from the constant turnover and never-ending need to find and hire new people on the teller line.”

Not every member has loved it, of course, but with the growth in self-service instead of cashiers at retail stores, consumers are getting used to it, Schouten says. And the value-add the credit union is getting from its member experience advisors helping members with both the self-serve options and lending and deposit product sales has made the work and investment well worth it, he says.

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