About Whatcom Educational Credit Union (WECU)


WECU is a not-for-profit financial cooperative whose mission is to make a meaningful difference in the lives of their members. Since 1936, WECU has earned a strong reputation for providing honest, genuine service and being committed to the local community.

Headquarters: Bellingham, Washington 
Size: 425 employees across 10 locations in Whatcom and Skagit Counties
Membership: Over 165,000 members
Coconut Solutions: Appointment Scheduling, Lobby Management, Reserve with Google, Phone and Video meeting add on, Advanced Analytics.

SUCCESS SNAPSHOT

Growth
30,000+ Appointments Scheduled		Efficiency 
4,000+ Staff Hours Saved Annually (estimated)		Member Experience
20-Point Member NPS Increase


WECU’s Goals: Keep Up With Branch Foot Traffic—and Member Expectations

WECU’s members rely on the credit union for expert financial guidance and convenient, friendly service. WECU is always looking for new ways to serve its membership—especially through offering new digital tools that make banking easier.

In 2020, WECU’s Digital Services team sought to replace their existing electronic check-in system for managing in-person appointment requests. The legacy solution, which was built in-house by a web developer, kept a simple running list of walk-ins to ensure members were seen on a first-come, first served basis.

However, this “virtual line-up” tool wasn’t doing much to improve the member experience—or the branch staff’s ability to manage foot traffic.

Challenge #1: Offering Convenient, Timely Service to Members

While the in-house check-in system was an improvement over using paper and pencil to track walk-in appointments, it occasionally crashed—leaving WECU staff to guess who should be next.

Scheduling appointments in advance when members requested them also wasn’t easy for staff. The process could take hours (or even days) of phone tag or email exchanges to find the right person and arrange a meeting. Even booking safe deposit box visits required staff to navigate multiple calendars across branches to secure a private timeslot.

“It was very simplistic and it did not meet our needs,” says Malori. “We knew we needed something centralized and more sophisticated.”

Challenge #2: Improving Branch Efficiency and Staff Productivity

Since WECU didn’t have a centralized calendar system for seeing appointment availability, staff would often ask members to walk into a local branch to seek help instead. Members, however, couldn’t be certain that the specialist they needed would be available upon arrival, as availability depended on the length of the queue. They also couldn’t know if the specific person they needed to speak with was available at that location.

This inability to predict where and when certain staff would be needed to serve members meant branches could quickly be overrun with foot traffic and line-ups—causing lobby abandonment.

“It was kind of a gamble,” says Malori Schlosser, Product Manager, Digital Services at WECU. “You might walk into a branch and meet with somebody right away—or there might be 10 people ahead of you and it’s going to be a three-hour wait. We wanted to be more respectful of our member’s time.”

Challenge #3 – Gaining Accurate Insights to Inform Strategy

Without a formalized system for tracking appointments and branch traffic, WECU had no visibility into what services were popular, which branches had the longest wait times, and other important insights that could shape their service strategy.

It also wasn’t easy to understand how productive staff were (or weren’t). Without an accurate count of meetings or walk-ins handled by each branch, managers often relied on how busy staff perceived themselves to be.

This turned strategic decisions about staffing levels and service offerings into best guesses rather than data-driven choices. “Being able to better see what is coming in would allow us to deploy our staff and resources more efficiently,” says Malori.

WECU’s Solution: Adopting A Centralized Platform for Managing Appointments

WECU’s Digital Services team sought to replace their existing tool with a purpose-built, fully-supported platform for appointment scheduling and lobby management.

The forward-thinking credit union wanted to partner with a Software as a Service (SaaS) provider to deliver an exceptional experience to its members. After evaluating solutions, WECU chose Coconut Software as its preferred vendor because of its cloud-based suite of solutions, easy-to-use admin interface, and unparalleled customization flexibility.

Here are the key modules they chose to adopt:

Solution #1 – Appointment Scheduling

Coconut’s appointment scheduling solution creates a centralized platform for booking appointments with staff (depending on the member’s need). It streamlines the booking process and gives staff visibility into upcoming appointments so they can prepare in advance. Single Sign-On (SSO) and integrations with WECU’s Contact Center tools make it easy for anyone in the organization to use Coconut for bookings.

Members can also access a self-serve portal to schedule meetings at their convenience. They can specify the appointment type, channel (phone, video, or in-person), location, and language. It’s easy for members to find and use the scheduling tool through booking links placed on WECU’s website, in its banking app, and within staff email signatures. They also adopted Coconut’s ‘Reserve With Google’ add-on, which lets members book an appointment directly from the result pages when they search for a specific branch location.

Thanks to automated reminders and checklists, members are less likely to miss appointments or forget important documents they need to complete a transaction.

Solution #2 – Lobby and Visitor Management 

Coconut’s Lobby and Visitor Management allows WECU to track both pre-scheduled appointments and walk-in meetings across their branches. This benefits staff since they can prepare the right paperwork before members come in and ensures members are reminded of any required documentation they need to bring. Branch managers can also better plan staffing levels or breaks around times they know will be busy with appointments.

The walk-in experience has been significantly enhanced, offering greater transparency and convenience for members. Members can see up-to-the-minute wait time estimates on lobby screens or online, making it easy to decide if they’d like to wait for an appointment that day or come back another time. Those who have pre-booked appointments can also check in quickly using their mobile device or lobby kiosk and head to the waiting area—instead of getting in line to sign in first.

Solution #3 – Advanced Analytics

With Coconut’s Advanced Analytics solution, WECU can track a variety of activities they couldn’t before—including appointment volume, walk-in traffic, and no-show rates. This data, combined with the robust capabilities of Coconut’s advanced reports, helps them forecast branch capacity and deploy the right staff across locations to keep wait times low.

WECU also gets a clearer picture of staff utilization and reasons for appointments. Real-time booking data shows where team members spend the most time and who may be overbooked (or under capacity). Custom question responses—which are collected from members during the appointment process—also make it easier to spot trends and strategize better ways to serve members.

The Results: Strategically Leveling Up Branch Operations and The Member Experience

Within weeks of implementing Coconut Software, WECU saw major improvements to member engagement, branch operations, and data tracking. After several years of using the platform to collect insights, they’ve also improved their strategic decision-making around staffing, physical locations, and service offerings.

WECU introduced the platform for use across their contact centers, branches, lending and business teams, and all other member-facing departments. “The training was minimal because the platform is very easy to use,” says Malori of the implementation process. “It’s very intuitive, so we didn’t need to do a lot of practice. There were no glitches or hiccups, and the roll-out went quite smoothly.”

Results #1 – Improved efficiency of member engagement

  • Real-time member routing: It could take hours or days to schedule a meeting with the right staff member. Now, members get an appointment within minutes, and they can cancel or reschedule as needed through a web app. Appointment requests have also been embedded into support chat flows. For example, if members have questions about loans or mortgages, they’ll be offered a meeting with a specialist who can answer their questions.
  • Faster, better meetings: Meetings take less time since staff can prepare paperwork in advance and members receive notifications about the types of documents they need before coming in. A basic account opening was originally 60 minutes, but it has since been shortened to 30-45 minutes. “It’s nice for staff to know what is ahead of them,” says Robin Taubenheim, Digital Services Specialist at WECU. “They can prepare rather than fly by the seat of their pants.”
  • 20-point NPS increase: Prior to launching Coconut, WECU’s NPS hovered between a respectable 65-67 score. For members who pre-booked an appointment through Coconut, the NPS score leapt up to 86. “Coconut ensures we always match members with the right person the first time,” says Malori. “We’ve gotten great feedback about the simplicity of the system from members.”

Results #2 – Improved Staff and Branch Efficiency

  • Shorter wait times: In-branch wait times have decreased dramatically since branch managers can have the right staff in place to handle pre-booked appointments. Appointment requests for things that can be done without an in-person meeting are also being re-routed with online prompts or by a staff member—reducing the number of unnecessary branch visits. “Being able to route someone online really takes the load off branches,” says Robin. “It’s rare for us to have a long wait at this point.”
  • More high-value appointments: Now that meetings are generally shorter, mortgage specialists and loan officers can take on more appointments. Plus, with better preparation, staff are offering a more personalized, consultative experience. Direct booking links have also been used by the marketing team during educational webinars to increase the number of appointments booked afterward. From mid-2020 to the present, WECU has completed 30,000+ appointments. “We’ve seen appointment adoption continue to increase year over year,” says Robin.
  • Improved staff efficiency: Now that appointment booking tasks are streamlined and automated, staff have less administrative work to do (like searching calendars or sending reminder emails). “We’ve gained a lot of efficiency,” says Malori. And since WECU can see which appointments are the most popular at each branch, they can ensure staff are prepared to handle them—and reduce service bottlenecks. “Seeing the most common tasks at each location has helped us focus our staff training on what’s most important,” says Malori.

Results #3 – Data-Backed, Strategic Decision-Making

  • More accurate staffing models: The WECU team has used Coconut’s wealth of appointment and walk-in data to improve their staffing models. Reports now tell them which days, times, and seasons are busier so they can avoid over- or understaffing. WECU can also now track how many appointments individual staff members handle and set performance benchmarks across the teams. “We used to rely on personal perceptions, but now we can see exactly how busy staff are,” says Malori. “We are grounded in reality and can be much more strategic with how we staff our branches.”
  • Successfully expanding WECU’s footprint: When WECU was looking to expand into a new county, they leveraged appointment data to understand what kind of services they should offer and whether a full hub or a smaller spoke branch would make the most sense. “We were able to see where out-of-county members were coming from and what they were coming in for,” says Malori. “It’s been very insightful to help guide those decisions as we continue to grow.”
  • Intelligently adjusting services: Coconut’s data has helped WECU pinpoint areas of improvement for their service offerings. “If we see hundreds of people coming in for ‘account maintenance’,  we’ll dig into what they needed so we can resolve it faster in the future,” says Malori. Appointment and foot traffic data points have also helped WECU in making the decision to permanently close a branch by validating that nearby locations could continue to fully serve member needs. “These insights allow us to make large strategic decisions and figure out how to serve our members better,” says Malori.

Conclusion

The WECU Digital Services team hopes to continue building upon their success with Coconut Software by further integrating it with other systems (like their business digital banking offering) to give members a more seamless, cross-channel experience.

“Now, members know they’re going to get help quickly and see the right person the first time—which we couldn’t always deliver previously,” says Malori. “I can’t imagine not having appointment scheduling software. It would be a mess, and I don’t see how we could live without it.”