I. Make it easy to get information about your products and services.

The Fuze Suite provides your members and employees with one central access point to look up answers, ask questions, request a call back, and provide feedback. Members and employees can also set bookmarks on specific information of interest, set alerts to be notified of new information, and review the most commonly asked questions. This allows them to quickly get up to speed on unfamiliar products, services, or personal finance concepts. Instead of having to navigate through multiple website layers, or review several unrelated items returned by a general search, the Fuze Suite enables users to quickly and easily find the information they are looking for. It can also greatly simplify your website navigation, since content can be linked from the Fuze Suite and does not need to be integrated into an already complex navigation structure.

FuzeDigital helps you quickly get started by providing over 300 seed Q&As that represent questions commonly asked of credit unions, which are then personalized for your credit union. From there you add any additional Q&As you would like, and then you let the knowledge base naturally grow as questions are answered and recommended for publishing into the knowledge base

The information maintained in your knowledge base is presented in the form of a knowledge item.

A knowledge item is comprised of a question and answer, or a topic and article, and includes links to other relevant sources of information such as a Web page, Word document, application form, multi-media clip, or any web-accessible file. The beauty of the Q&A format is that it gets right to the point.

No need to read through lots of general information to extract that one nugget of knowledge found somewhere in your general marketing copy. Our world has become an increasingly busy place and you need to make it easy to get right to the desired information. Then, if your member desires additional or broader information, they can access the related links.

To quickly find knowledge items, the Fuze Suite includes advanced search tools to scan the knowledge base using keywords, refine the search by the desired information category, and sort the search results by knowledge item relevance, user rating or item newness. Used in combination, these search tools enable your members and staff to quickly find their answers, regardless of how large your knowledge base grows.

II. Provide broad and dynamic unbiased personal finance information and tools.

With the Fuze Suite, you have the option to purchase knowledge packs on various personal finance topics. Knowledge packs reside in your knowledge base, assume your Web site’s look and feel, include calculators, and are updated periodically by FuzeDigital to keep them fresh and accurate. The content has been reviewed by a CPA, is unbiased and written in a fun and understandable style.

The knowledge packs include direct links into your relevant products and services pages to assist with your cross-selling efforts. An important aspect of Fuze knowledge packs is that they do not link to other sites with competing products.

Decision support and wealth management solutions from vendors such as Experion Systems and Financial Engines can also be easily integrated into the Fuze Suite as a method to extend more sophisticated financial management tools.

III. Make it easy to use your products and services.

In addition to knowledge packs about personal finance, future releases will offer knowledge packs about usage of browsers, connectivity topics, and online banking services. These knowledge packs will be visually rich and walk members through various functions, one step at a time.

By providing members with a quick and easy visual method to navigate through the technology themselves, without the fear of looking stupid to someone else, you can significantly reduce the natural apprehension experienced when utilizing unfamiliar technologies, and therefore stimulate adoption. Most importantly, the Fuze Suite allows credit unions to extend a comprehensive digital support channel, which in itself will help stimulate adoption of online banking services.

IV. Make it easy for your staff to support your products and services.

Your credit union’s knowledge base can also contain private knowledge items that are only accessible by your staff. Private knowledge items include information such as internal procedures and product and service messaging that you do not wish to extend directly to your members. Alerts, a proprietary feature inherent with the knowledge base, provide a strong training vehicle by notifying staff when new information is posted to the knowledge base. And, since alerts can be set for specific categories of information, staff can be notified of changes or updates that are relevant to their area of work, rather than being subjected to information overload, as typically is the experience with Intranets. Future releases of the Fuze Suite will offer knowledge packs on internal information relating to regulatory and compliance issues.

V. Provide responsive channels for asking questions and providing feedback

According to Jupiter Media Metrics, consumer e-mail response expectations have been increasing, from 24 hours in Q1 1999 down to 6 hours in Q1 2001. With expectations moving so quickly, what must they be today? To extend an effective digital support channel, you must deliver service that meets the expectations for the given channel. It is recommended that emails and all online inquiries receive responses within a maximum of 4 hours. Unlike your call center, where members may drop off after a couple minutes of waiting and call back at another time, online users won’t even use the channel if they believe that the service levels are unsatisfactory.

More than just a pretty face, the Fuze Suite provides an intuitive back-end that allows you to consistently, securely and painlessly deliver online support within these aggressive service expectations. All incoming online questions and feedback, along with email, are automatically captured in an incident database. These “incidents” can then be automatically routed to anyone in your organization with the most appropriate skill-set and the fewest number of open incidents. If you opt to route all incidents to your contact center, your agents can easily request input from other staff, or assign the incident to more appropriate staff throughout your credit union. Regardless of who ends up with ownership for the incident, it still resides in the incident database, ensuring that nothing falls through the cracks. Management can then monitor exactly how quickly your staff is responding to and closing out online and email member inquiries. Incidents that are close to exceeding your established service levels are quickly identified for prompt action.

All incoming incidents and outgoing responses can be encrypted to ensure that your members’ data is protected,

providing you with an alternative method for your members to get account specific information.

Just a small percentage shift of some of your members to this channel can significantly reduce the resources required in your contact center to handle peak volumes. Your members also significantly benefit by having the ability to securely ask questions whenever it is convenient for them, and to securely and privately receive a response online. Don’t underestimate the value to your members of having this option since they are frequently at work when talking with your contact center and many times would prefer to get their answers using an online channel that affords them more privacy in the busy and open work environments of today.

Because the incidents are centrally managed, both you and your member have the ability to quickly review history of all previous inquiries for that member. This allows your staff to have valuable information about past member interactions that may lead them to handle a given incident differently. One piece of information that may be especially important to consider is the level of member satisfaction on previous incidents. We all know that if handled correctly, a dissatisfied member can be turned into a happy and loyal member. To this end, the Fuze Suite enables your staff to capture the level of satisfaction of the member, which generally is not a reflection of the rep contacted, but rather of the process or delivery. Incidents reflecting that the member is dissatisfied are clearly denoted for staff (not included in the members’ view) when reviewing previous member incidents. Further, incidents reflecting member dissatisfaction can be automatically routed to managers for immediate attention and/or used to evolve current procedures and policies. Broad reporting of member feedback to incidents is provided on an aggregate level, as well.

VI. Integrate all support channels.

The Fuze Suite can capture questions and feedback received from your Web site, email, fax, phone and in-person. A single member incident can be comprised of interactions from any and all of these channels, as well as involving multiple support staff. By maintaining all of this information in one place, and by extending your knowledge base to all support staff, you are able to provide a consistent member experience across all channels, and involving all staff with member interaction. Best of all, members won’t have to repeat themselves anymore.

The credit union can also benefit from rich member information that has been captured digitally for use in marketing and sales efforts. Future releases of the Fuze Suite will contain modules that are focused on additional CRM-like functionality.

VII. Measure actual results against your target metrics and adjust.

The Fuze Suite automatically captures and reports on several service level metrics. Using these reports in conjunction with your target service levels and ROI metrics, you will be able to continually validate the success of the channel and refine as appropriate.