Member Loyalty Group

SF Fire Credit Union
 
SF Fire Credit Union serves the Northern California Firefighting Community and those who support them with 2 full-service branches. They have $649 million in assets and serve 26,000 members. In the spring of 2008, they began a new leg on their NPS journey with Member Loyalty Group. You see…SF Fire Credit Union was one of the first credit unions to adopt and develop an NPS program.
 
Today most credit unions are looking for ways to increase fee income. SF Fire took a leap of faith and decided to reduce fee income by eliminating a bad profit. According to Fred Reichheld, bad profits are made when you erode employee morale and create member detractors. Diana Dykstra, CEO of SF Fire CU made a difficult decision when she convinced her board to rebate all ATM surcharges incurred by her members at competitors’ ATMs. She found this to be a key driver of detractors and completely out of her control. When she weighed the cost of buying and deploying enough ATMs to reduce complaints versus just rebating surcharges, it was a no brainer. One way you could look at this – is as a marketing expense.
 
Her proof that this worked? Go to Yelp.com and type in Credit Unions and San Francisco and you’ll see she has the highest rated financial institution by far in the entire bay area. One of the key drivers for this voluntary expression of love? Rebating surcharges. They are also growing new memberships by about 9% per year!
 
This credit union turned bad profits into promoter members. That’s loyalty economics.
 
Up next: More key drivers of loyalty.