Differentiation is worth the investment where members can actually experience it.
Credit union resources are finite, while opportunities to differentiate seem to be everywhere. But opportunities to differentiate in ways members actually notice and value, are much harder to find. To do this, a credit union needs to consistently deliver on table stakes, or the base-level experience and products expected by the market, while deciding where they are positioned to, and capable of, standing out from competitors.
In some ways, we’ve already been pulling on this thread over the last year, looking at how credit unions can go digital without losing distinction. It’s a call to action for credit unions to level up their digital maturity while avoiding a head-to-head digital competition with big banks and fintechs that credit unions will lose. Instead, the opportunity is to do digital differently: keeping the member experience rooted in the things competitors can’t easily replicate and changing the terms of competition.
While this lays the foundation for an experience strategy by reimagining the credit union difference through a human-centered digital lens, it leaves a bit open how and where an individual credit union creates that distinction. It also opens a potential investment trap where, in an effort to create digital distinction, credit unions spread resources thin by “differentiating” across the member experience and deep into the tech stack. The result can be a lot of customization without much meaningful differentiation.
Credit unions don’t need to differentiate everywhere. The challenge is choosing where differentiation matters enough to warrant disproportionate investment.
Finding the moments that matter
This is where a concept like signature moments can be a helpful tool for thinking about how and where to create differentiation, and therefore how and where to invest.
The basic idea is to identify particular interactions across the consumer lifecycle where an organization is positioned to create a small number of remarkable and memorable differences. The goal is to find the interactions where your credit union has both the capability and credibility to do something meaningfully different—something that reinforces the position you want to own in the market.
A signature moment should pass a few basic tests: Members notice it. It creates an emotional response. It feels unmistakably like your credit union. And your organization can deliver it consistently.
There are many well-known examples of these: Apple’s unboxing experience, the Dairy Queen Blizzard flip, Chewy’s condolence flowers, Spotify Wrapped. While these moments are coming from large companies, these moments don’t need to be grandiose or complex, but they do need to be novel, spark emotion, and undeniably reflect your brand and the experience you want people to have with it. These moments also tend to do double duty. Not only do these drive differentiation for your brand, but they generate one of the most powerful types of storytelling: the stories your members organically tell others.
Identifying these experiences can help your credit union be more explicit in its experience investment strategy. Moments of differentiation should be allocated budget beyond what is needed to deliver a baseline good experience. Everything else, from the remaining interactions in your member journeys to the tech stack and the capabilities enabling the entire experience, should be built as economically as possible, defaulting to best practices without customization.
Credit unions don’t need to differentiate all the way down the stack
Bringing differentiation up to the level of experiences also reintroduces a strategic advantage credit unions sometimes shy away from when it comes to anything remotely member strategy adjacent: cooperation among credit unions.
If differentiation is concentrated in a small number of signature moments, then more of the underlying capabilities become candidates for cooperation, shared resources, and scale. By cooperatively creating stronger foundations, credit unions may gain greater freedom to invest in the experiences, expertise, relationships, and community impact that actually set them apart in the eyes of members.
Ultimately, that brings us back to the central question: where is differentiation actually worth the investment?
The answer will be different for every credit union. But the discipline behind it can be the same: Get the fundamentals right. Resist customization for its own sake. Then identify the handful of moments where your credit union has the capability, credibility, and opportunity to create an experience members will remember
“Going digital in an authentic way for your credit union while making the most effective use of technology investments to create distinction” does not have as nice of a ring to it, but this is what credit unions are up against. The good news is that, Credit unions don’t need to be different everywhere. They need to be meaningfully different where it matters.
—JG
