Consumers is excited to launch Voice Check, a new feature to keep your account information even more more secure. On this edition of Money, I’m Home, Lynne is joined by Consumers’ Vice President of Member Service Nate Stinson to discuss this new technology and all the ways the Consumers team works to keep member service and security top-of-mind.

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0:00:07.1 Lynn Jarman-Johnson (LJJ): Money, I’m Home! Welcome in. I’m Lynne Jarman-Johnson with Consumers Credit Union. From finance to fitness, we have it all. And one of the things that we love to do is bring you new technology, teach you how to use it. It’s all about really making your member experience the best it can be. And someone who does that on a daily basis is Nate Stinson. He’s our vice president of member services. Welcome in today, Nate.

0:00:31.8 Nate Stinson (NS): Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

0:00:33.1 LJJ: Well, this is exciting. I understand this is your first podcast.

0:00:38.1 NS: It is. Yes!

0:00:39.3 LJJ: I don’t know. It’s probably on your bucket list somewhere, right?

0:00:41.2 NS: Definitely. Yup. [laughter]

0:00:44.7 LJJ: I love it. Hey, Nate, thank you so much for being with us today. I want to get a little background about you. You are really focusing in on member service for us every day, day in, day out. And it’s a 24/7 job, isn’t it?

0:00:58.1 NS: Yes, it is. [chuckle] Absolutely. Yup. We are always looking for ways to bring new technology to our members, different ways that they can bank and really make it the best experience possible. Whether you’re working with one of our team members or working with our app, we’re always looking at ways to make things easier for you.

0:01:14.9 LJJ: So, tell us about your credit union journey, how you came to Consumers. I know that we’re so excited to have you as our vice president. You really run not only the call center, but so many hearts of people when they’re interacting with us. Tell us about how you got here and what your goals are.

0:01:32.7 NS: Yeah, absolutely. I started in our call center as one of the representatives. I actually wanted to be a teller first, and they told me I was going to work in the call center. And I was like, “Shoot, I didn’t want to do that.” But [chuckle] I actually fell in love with it. I fell in love with the role and helping our members and it helped me decide my career path was that I wanted to lead the call center one day and help our team members and our leaders do that same thing. So…

0:01:57.2 LJJ: You know, I love the fact that it’s such a great testimonial to the fact that a, when you come into Consumers, you might not come in the spot you think you’re going to work [chuckle] but boy we try to get you there. Don’t we?

0:02:09.4 NS: Yup, absolutely.

0:02:10.3 LJJ: So, tell us a little bit about the people that you work with on a day-to-day basis. And how important is member service?

0:02:16.2 NS: It’s our number one top priority. What’s really cool is we hire such amazing people that genuinely care about helping people and have a passion for helping people. So, I’m lucky I work with about 90 people that their number one priority is to make someone’s life easier, make someone’s life better, make their dreams come true. It’s cool to see such a large group with such a passion for that. We strive to do that every single day.

0:02:42.1 LJJ: You know, it truly is a partnership between the member and our team, you know, trying to make sure that the financial education is there, but also helping if there’s little blips in their life or, or in the systems. I want to talk a little bit about the fact of the seamless integration that we are building between what you mentioned earlier, digital, and in-person and call center. You had mentioned, “Hey, you know what, I really wanted to be a teller when I first started.” Our tellers now are TellerPlus+ teams, you know, it’s like people who are on FaceTime, but on our ATMs, which we call the TellerPlus+ system. How important is that integration between where someone, if they do want in person, how they can get there, or they love to just talk on the phone to our call center team.

0:03:30.2 NS: I think it’s absolutely important. It gives members flexibility to bank with us how they want, which is one of our passions. They can work with somebody they can work with someone through the ATM, they can call in. There’s so many different ways they can do it. But it’s so important to us that we give members the options to work with a person in the best ways for them possible. And I think we do that we do that daily through our interactive tellers, and over the phone and through our app and in office.

0:03:58.5 LJJ: And I love the fact that our tellers or our call center representatives, every single person that we hire are local. You know, there’s a lot of times that people will say, Am I being shipped off somewhere? Absolutely not. We are local. We live in your community. That’s critical, isn’t it?

0:04:15.0 NS: Absolutely 100%. We’re in tune with our community. And we’re close to our community. And that just drives that passion for our tellers and our representatives to want to help our members. I think it’s so funny because our tellers get all the time like, “Oh, where are you located? What state are you in?” It’s… We’re in Michigan. We’re in Kalamazoo! We’re here!

0:04:33.5 LJJ: It is absolutely so much fun, though. Hey, a quick question to you because I think this is so exciting. When I found out we were we were going to be focusing on this. It’s all about security for us. And we recently have had some wonderful podcasts about the uptick and how people are learning to try to give fraud just an in, everywhere you are, whether it’s… You’re at the store, whether you’re at your house and you receive a phone call now even texting. This has started to happen. Well, we are introducing something called Voice Check. Nate, tell us all about it.

0:05:11.8 LJJ: Yeah, this is something we’re super excited about. because you’re right, fraud is on the rise. And we’re trying to educate members. But it’s our job to make sure we are protecting our members accounts and their information the best we can. So, Voice Check is a really great feature for our members when they call in, it will actually identify them by the sound of their voice. So, we will enroll a member into our Voice Check. And it will check against a previous recording and will without a doubt let us know yes, you are speaking to the right person or no, you are not.

0:05:44.9 LJJ: Wow. And you know what you cannot fake a voice, can you?

0:05:47.3 NS: You can’t no. And we’ve tried we’ve been testing and trying to fake people’s voices to see if we can get through it and you cannot.

0:05:54.2 LJJ: How do people… Will members be able to sign up for this? And I think it’s something people are going to absolutely love.

0:06:00.6 NS: Absolutely. It’s so easy. So, when they call in, we’re going to ask you every time “Hey, would you like to enroll into our Voice Check?” If you say yes, it takes us just a few seconds to take a snippet of your voice, you are enrolled. And then each time you call in, it will check against that snippet and make sure we’re speaking to the right person. And what that really does is not only makes your account more secure and protects you, it makes the process of calling in a lot quicker.

0:06:26.0 LJJ: Right? Because it’s an automatic check.

0:06:28.1 NS: Absolutely. It takes two to three seconds to hear your voice and say “Yes, this is the correct person.”

0:06:32.8 LJJ: How is the team feeling about this?

0:06:35.5 NS: Great. They feel very good because they know then without a doubt they’re speaking to the right person and they don’t have to worry about a fraudster calling in and trying to get account information because we’ll catch it every single time.

0:06:46.9 LJJ: Nate, this is awesome. So, tell us a little bit about… While you are the VP, you’re obviously researching continuously about ways to prevent fraud, but also ways to help serve our members better.

0:07:00.1 NS: Absolutely. Yeah. And this gives so many more options for them to serve them. And, and really, I think a lot of things that this does is help our member get what they need over the phone quicker. It just provides so many benefits to help secure their account.

0:07:15.4 LJJ: You know, Nate, you’re obviously involved in the credit union experience, which we absolutely love. How important is it? Do you find other credit unions that you watch or read about, to say, “Oh, this is a new tool or something that we really want to help bring to our members?”

0:07:31.7 NS: I honestly haven’t seen it out there locally a lot. It’s kind of a new emerging [chuckle] technology. I’ve seen it with a lot of bigger companies and financial institutions. As far as credit unions, I think we’re one of the first in line with it. So, it’s very exciting.

0:07:45.5 LJJ: You know what’s interesting, Nate, you just brought up the best point. It’s that it’s a constant look at not only financial institutions, but what are other companies that are best in class doing?

0:07:57.1 NS: Yeah, absolutely. We always try to be in the forefront of technology and providing our members new and innovative solutions to help them bank and help protect their accounts. And I think this is exactly what Voice Check is doing.

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0:08:07.8 LJJ: Well, Nate, we are so thrilled to have launched Voice Check this week. We cannot thank you enough. You have been a, a joy to talk to on your very first podcast.

0:08:18.0 NS: Yes, it was great. Thank you so much for having me. I had a lot of fun!

0:08:21.3 LJJ: I don’t think it was too painful, was it?

0:08:23.9 NS: No, no, it was pretty easy. [laughter]

0:08:26.2 LJJ: Hey, check that voice you guys when you’re calling in, make sure you say “Yes, I want to do Voice Check.” We sure would love it. And also, if you have a topic you’d like, send it our way. We would love to talk about anything, even if it’s a unique story that’s in the community, we want to hear about it. Hey, thank you, Jake Esselink for your production skills. Nate, again, thank you so much for being with us.

0:08:47.8 NS: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

0:08:49.8 NS: I’m Lynne Jarman-Johnson, Consumers Credit Union. Money, I’m home.

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