Chevron Federal Credit Union

Since 1935, Chevron Federal Credit Union (CFCU) has prided itself on its knowledgeable and friendly staff that is always ready to assist members who prefer person-to-person service. While they have several branches located at Chevron facilities, their membership base spans the globe. Their call center representatives take care of members all over the world by fax, telephone and email, but it is quite difficult to provide contact services 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. That is why the credit union turned to the leading provider in 24-hour credit union call center services, PSCU Financial Services, and its call center service, Total Member Care".

Mitch Dormer, VP Controller at CFCU, was on the team that was tasked with finding a vendor that would help the credit union ensure they were available for their 66,000+ members around the clock. Dormer recalls, we considered a handful of vendors, but it was obvious that PSCU Financial Services had the experience and skill sets that we needed. As Assistant Vice President of Operations, Maria Roy was also actively involved in the due diligence phase. She emphasizes, I called not only the contacts on their reference list, but other PSCU Financial Services clients that were not on their list. The overall impression that I received from them was quite positive.

The credit union wanted the outsourcing operation to be as transparent as possible to their members. Dormer explains that we wanted to go beyond the basics of simple balance inquiries and money transfers and give our members the ability to receive help on all sorts of issues, such as card problems and online banking issues. While this type of outside access to the credit unions core system could possibly cause concern from internal auditors and external examiners, PSCU Financial Services quickly assuaged the credit unions concerns with their impressive security features: their representatives are well screened; they have no access to printers; they arent allowed to have cell phones; and they cant even have pens or paper in their cubicles!

Before they went live with the after-hours service, CFCU worked closely with PSCU Financial Services project management team to develop scripts that the representatives would use to answer member questions. Ruby Vaughn, Call Center Supervisor at the credit union, confirms, we spent a great deal of time and effort developing scripts, and that effort is ongoing. The next step was to have various employees from the credit union perform secret shopping calls to PSCU Financial Services and ask a wide variety of questions. Vaughn reports that the tests went well and PSCU Financial Services was very helpful in working together to review the calls and scripts. The credit unions team went back to work adding and refining scripts and Vaughn was pleased to discover that PSCU Financial Services performed research and had fine-tuned and added some scripts of their own which was very helpful.

Even though the credit union did not advertise that they could now accept calls after hours (6PM  6AM Monday through Friday), they received more than 1,500 calls in the first month. Once they let their members know about their new 24-hour live agent capabilities, the calls have started to rapidly increase. CFCU is now so pleased with the results and confident in Total Member Care services that they have closed their internal call center on Saturday and turned those responsibilities over to PSCU Financial Services as well. According to Roy, we have found the Total Member Care representatives to be very professional and helpful towards our members, and even though they were using scripts, they sounded conversational.

While this type of project can never really be said to be completed, Dormer says our senior management team views this as a very successful endeavor. He adds we have been very satisfied with PSCU Financial Services, and it has been an excellent partnership for us. Roy concurs with Dormer, and concludes we are quite impressed with their high service levels and would not hesitate to recommend them to other credit unions.