Tune into this week’s episode of Money, I’m Home as Lynne is joined by two of Consumers’ interns on the marketing team, Fahad Shiraj and Brandon Westbrooks to talk about their goals for the summer and how they’re making a real impact in the lives of our members.

 

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0:00:06.8 Lynne Jarman-Johnson (LJJ): Money, I’m home. Welcome, and I’m Lynne Jarman-Johnson with Consumers Credit Union. From finance to fitness, we have it all. And today I am so honored to introduce to you two invaluable people on our marketing team, and that is our two interns for the summer. And you’re saying, “Interns?” I’ll tell you what, I’ve already learned so much from them, so it’s really exciting! [chuckle]

0:00:30.6 LJJ: I want to start out by introducing to you Fahad Shiraj and Brandon Westbrooks. They are both in totally different departments on our team, which I think is so exciting. So today you’re going to really learn about what it’s like behind the scenes at Consumers Credit Union.

0:00:47.4 LJJ: Fahad, let’s start with you. You are a data miner. That’s all I can say. You are mining data all the time and coming up with great insights into how people can bank better. Welcome into the show.

0:01:00.1 Fahad Shiraj (FS): Thank you so much, Lynne.

0:01:01.7 LJJ: Tell us a little bit about how you came to Consumers and what makes you love data so much?

0:01:07.8 FS: So, about Consumers, I have been in Kalamazoo from 2019 and Consumers in Kalamazoo is a very, very big thing if you know, you see the offices in every [chuckle] spot.

0:01:20.0 FS: So, I started applying for jobs and I found this, I started off Consumers as a digital service representative first. So, I got to know about Consumers from LinkedIn at first. And the more I learned about the company, the more interested I started to become.

0:01:35.2 FS: When I interviewed with the company, I got to learn about this amazing culture of Consumers and how they treat the employees, and I was interested right away. I must say that of all the companies that I’ve worked with, Consumers has been the best one for me so far.

0:01:51.5 FS: And about data itself, I would say it is an amazing, amazing journey for me with data. Once I came to Western Michigan University in 2019, I had taken up a major in supply chain. I wanted to learn about that. But as I went along the way, I started to realize that I was actually more passionate about data itself.

0:02:10.4 FS: I saw how data could actually make contributions to businesses, and how if you were able to understand and manipulate data you could make actual contributions to making businesses be more successful. I got intrigued by that idea. And so far it has been an amazing journey. So far for me and I’m really interested to see what the future holds for me.

0:02:33.6 LJJ: Thank you so much. And we said at the beginning from finance to fitness, and we’re now going to talk about data and then also heading into marketing digital, Brandon Westbrooks is here too. Brandon, thank you so much for being with us. And you’re a little familiar to some people. There’s some TikToks running around. [chuckle]

0:02:56.1 Brandon Westbrooks (BS): Oh yeah!

0:02:56.2 LJJ: Welcome.

0:02:56.3 BW: Hi. I’ve been here since 2021, the summer of 2021. I’m going to school right now at Western Michigan as well. I am a digital marketing and e-commerce major, so we work a lot with data as well.

0:03:07.3 BW: But the thing that really drew me towards that major was the creative aspect. We take the data and then really think outside of the box on how to apply that data to business strategies.

0:03:17.3 BW: That’s where I really fell in love with it. Because like Fahad, I didn’t start as a digital marketing major, I didn’t go directly into where my major was. I initially started out as a general business major. That wasn’t my thing. So, I decided, “Okay, I’m going to go into meteorology. I’m fascinated with the weather.”

0:03:35.8 BW: So, I decided to go into meteorology. I took one science class, realized, no. That’s when I went into continue my general business major, found out I loved marketing. And then eventually once I got to digital marketing there at Western Michigan University, I just fell in love with it.

0:03:53.4 BW: And I really feel like that was where the future was heading, with SEO strategies, content strategies, and just general analysis online, Google analytics, stuff like that. So that’s my background there.

0:04:07.4 BW: As far as Consumers, I’ve been here as well as Fahad. I started here in the DSC, in our Digital Service Center, started making some TikTok with you guys. So that’s been a lot of fun. I’ve been increasing my creative capabilities along the way and it’s been a lot of fun and I’m excited for this internship.

0:04:25.6 LJJ: What is interesting to me is both of you are on the TellerPlus+ team, and that means that anybody that is banking with us and they head to an office or they go through our drive through, push a button and then there you are.

0:04:41.0 LJJ: When you guys both started, and Fahad I’ll start with you, were you surprised at how different the technology is for banking today?

0:04:49.5 FS: I actually was, I was not aware of this video conferencing thing with our members. And actually it was quite surprising to me how banking has become much more easier than it was back in the day. Because you’d have to stand in line and wait for your turn, because it was all a hassle thing and it was a lot of problematic I would say.

0:05:10.9 FS: But now it’s much more easier, much more accessible. You can just click on that screen and here you are, you get a teller who will help you out with your transactions. So, I would say it’s much more easier and accessible.

0:05:22.3 LJJ: Brandon, did you find when you got here that the difference not only in the speed, but also being able to educate members?

0:05:31.4 BW: Yeah, it’s everything is great. You’re right there. While you still have that personal connection, you’re sitting right there and you have access to everything directly in front of you. So, I’m not an expert at absolutely everything in the world, but I have everything I need to know right in front of me while I’m working with a member.

0:05:47.7 BW: I can provide my quality customer service to that member, get to know them. But if they have questions on rates, I can instantly find that, educate them, whatever they need I can do for them right there.

0:05:57.9 BW: And yeah, like Fahad was saying, it is a lot quicker. Super convenient. And I was, personally when I first saw this, I saw this before I started working here actually, I walked in and I felt exactly how I see members feel today. And they walked up to the TellerPlus+ and they’re a little hesitant. I was like, “You want me to stick my check inside there?”

[laughter]

0:06:18.5 BW: “Floating person above me?” You know? You get used to it quick and it is very cool.

0:06:23.1 LJJ: So, Brandon quickly, tell me a little bit about what your goals are for this summer internship? I know one of the projects you’re working on really is focusing on financial education, which is so thrilling for me.

0:06:34.4 BW: Yeah. So, one of my goals, like I said, I consider myself a very creative person and I like to apply the numbers I get to the business in a creative way.

0:06:44.7 BW: So right now, I’m working on a educational product, trying to figure out what specific needs people might want in regards to like what they need to know at certain stages of their life, from being a preteen all the way up until a hundred years old.

0:07:00.2 BW: I’m currently preparing a survey and I’m going to send that out to gather some information from everyone to see what certain types of information they want to know so we can educate everyone, members or not members. They can come and check out our website and see what we have to say about different generational steps as they go through their life of finance.

0:07:20.6 BW: As far as my personal goals going forward, I want to learn as much as I possibly can. You can sit in a classroom for 122 credits, and you go into the real world and you start learning quick because you’re going to mess up. And everything is very real when you’re here in the internship.

0:07:40.9 BW: It’s real world. I’m watching my progress being made. I’m seeing how it affects the business in a positive way, how it could affect it in a negative way. And I’m just taking all that information and trying to pack much as I possibly can in towards that.

0:07:52.8 LJJ: I’ll tell you what we’re going to do, Brandon and Fahad. At the end of the summer internship we’re going to do another podcast and we’re going to find out what you learned.

0:08:02.4 LJJ: Fahad, what’s your goals? And I really have been so already enamored. Anybody who knows me knows I love the word “dashboard” [chuckle] and I know that you’re working on that.

0:08:15.9 FS: As Brandon mentioned, it’s so different working on an internship, you get this real experience of working with real data and actually making contributions to real business itself. Whatever that I’m doing in this internship is actually helping the business succeed. The idea of that actually pushes us to give 100%.

0:08:37.1 FS: And right now, I’m working on this social media optimization project, where I’m taking data and analytics from our social media pages of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and Twitter, and I’m trying to see all these insights that we can get from the data and how we can improve our engagement with the audience.

0:09:00.1 FS: How we can make it much more accessible to the audience so that we can put our content out there, so that everyone can know what our plans are and what we are doing and what our marketing rates are and whatever, all the incentives that we want to provide. We want to connect better with the audience.

0:09:17.9 FS: So being that in mind, our main goal and objective of how we can connect better with the members, how we can make our members’ lives better, that’s our main goal. And all the data and all the analytics, that is just a backbone of our main objective.

0:09:35.8 FS: For this project I am trying to make dashboards to represent all this data in a much more simple but much more accessible way, so that you can just take a look into the dashboards and you can figure it out.

0:09:45.6 FS: Even if you don’t know much about data, that’s fine. You can see, look at the dashboards and you’ll be understand what is going on on this social media project as a whole or the company as a whole, what we are trying to achieve.

0:10:00.7 FS: That’s what my goals are, I would say for this summer, try to learn more about how I can visualize this data, make it more accessible, and let’s see how it goes.

[chuckle]

0:10:09.5 LJJ: Well, it’s already going great, and I put you guys on the spot and I sure do appreciate it. Number one, it’s all about the people, not only here at Consumers, but all the members we serve. And I can’t thank you guys enough for doing that so well.

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0:10:24.4 LJJ: Hey, I just want to thank you for listening and if you have a topic that you would like to share with us, just send it our way. Thank you, Jake Esselink for your production skills.

0:10:33.6 LJJ: Brandon, Fahad, I hope you guys have a fabulous summer. We are going to have a great, great working relationship and we’re going to really rock the projects you guys have.

0:10:42.7 FS: Thank you everyone. Bye-bye.

0:10:44.2 BW: Thank you.

[chuckle]

0:10:44.7 LJJ: Thanks all. Everyone have a wonderful, safe week.

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