Highlights:
- Increasing visibility: With RingCentral’s advanced reporting and analytics, Altura is gaining valuable insights into how to continually improve its members’ experience.
- Adding mobility: Altura now has a mobile platform for business communications —messaging, phone, and video—enabling staff to stay connected anywhere, anytime.
- Thinking proactively: RingCentral delivers so much new functionality and flexibility that Altura can now think about leveraging its telephony platform to grow its business.
A community-based credit union serving Southern Californians since 1957
As one of the largest locally owned and operated credit unions in Southern California’s Inland Empire, Altura Credit Union serves more than 160,000 members throughout Riverside and San Diego Counties, managing more than $2 billion in assets for those members.
Employees of Altura attribute the organization’s success to how they treat their members. Because Altura is locally run—employees live in the same communities as their members—the credit union can offer much more personalized and delightful experiences than those provided by national banks.
That level of personalization—coupled with Altura’s low fees and outstanding loan terms—helps explain why the organization scored a 96% satisfaction rate with its members in 2020. It also explains why in 2018, among credit unions managing more than $1 billion in assets, Altura was ranked the fourth-best in the United States—and number one California—by Credit Union Journal.
Maintaining Altura’s award-winning member service required a better phone system
Altura’s national recognition and positive word-of-mouth advertising by delighted members has led to steady growth year after year. But that growth also put pressure on Altura’s aging, on-premise phone system.
The organization’s IT team made do for as long as they could with the 15-year-old PBX system. But as Altura neared the 160,000-member mark—with its contact center agents fielding upwards of 50,000 calls a month—the team knew it was time for a communications overhaul.
“Because we’re a member-focused organization, the biggest driver for us to upgrade our telephony was improving our contact center operations,” says Turhan Hunt, Altura’s Vice President of Member Services. “The old system had serious limitations—for example, not allowing our managers to monitor agent performance with any granularity. Also, the system really didn’t support our agents working remotely, which obviously became a challenge with the COVID lockdowns.”
RingCentral Contact Center unlocks massive visibility into the member experience
As Turhan notes, RingCentral Contact Center created several workflow improvements for Altura’s member support agents. Just one example: for the first time, agents can now log into RingCentral from their laptops and take member calls from home, and the system will automatically record those calls, a compliance requirement in the financial industry.
But migrating to RingCentral also led to what Turhan believes will be an even more valuable advantage for Altura: gaining access to more visibility into the caller’s journey than the organization has ever had.
“What I found most exciting about RingCentral Contact Center was the ability to track and analyze the granular details of our members’ calling experience. Our old system basically gave us one number—you had 51,000 calls in April. What process improvements could we make with that information? Not many.” Now, Turhan explains, Altura has those granular details—and his team is beginning to use them to enhance the member experience.
“With RingCentral’s analytics tools, now we can monitor our callers’ journeys and learn what options they’re selecting, how long it takes to connect them to the right expert, whether they’re choosing the callback option rather than wait on hold, and what if any pain points they encounter. That level of visibility—which we’ve never had—is going to help us continually make Altura’s service better for our members.”
Discovering more workflow improvements with RingCentral integrations
Turhan also points out that his team is finding more ways to improve workflows with integrations they’ve discovered in the RingCentral App Gallery. One example, he explains, is RingCentral Pulse for Contact Centers.
“One of the other teams in our contact center department does outbound loan servicing. For that team, inbound calls are qualified leads, so they need to be answered right away. My colleague implemented the RingCentral Pulse integration, which lets him flag inbound calls as top-priority and automatically have them ring the right group of agents. That’s a great feature for that team, and it’s a good example of how we expect to keep finding more ways to make our telephony environment better with RingCentral integrations.”
Looking forward to more operational improvements with RingCentral
Finally, Turhan notes that with their legacy telephony infrastructure, Altura’s staff felt like they were playing defense—just trying to keep the system functioning as the organization grew. “Our legacy phone system was creating serious challenges to our operations—in terms of functionality, remote work capabilities, and even regulatory compliance,” he says.
Additionally, Turhan says his team and the rest of Altura are thinking about how to leverage their new cloud-telephony capabilities to enhance their operations.
“RingCentral gives us so much flexibility and functionality that we’re able to think about growth-oriented processes we hadn’t before—like adding contact center agents at our branches, setting up hybrid office space, and creating a more data-oriented coaching program for agents. Our old phone system kept us reactive. With RingCentral, we’re now able to make proactive moves that will help us grow.”
Originally published Apr 28, 2022