Understanding Your Social Community w/ OneUnited Bank | Simply Put

When many people think about their banks or their financial institutions, it is math and money and dollars. But this organization is grounded in the mission to bring financial literacy and make it a core belief within the black community in order to build generational wealth and to close the racial wealth gap. And that's a lot.

Wow. I love everything this bank stands for. What's up, y'? All? I'm Emmanuel Acho, your host for Simply Put, a show that takes headache inducing business situations and offers you simple, no dictionary needed solutions. On this final episode of Simply Put, you'll meet Rachelle Hines, vice president of social at One United Bank. Nice gig, right? Hanging out on Facebook and Twitter all day. But seriously, we'll let Rachelle tell us what really goes on between One United's social conversations, their online community and her customer support angels. You'll also hear from Nicole Granucci, salesforce genius at service cloud, who will help us understand how everything comes together behind the scenes and has an awesome demo she can't wait to share with. So keep an eye out for Nicole. Rochelle, you ready? Take it away.

I'm Rochelle Hines and I am the vice president of social media at One United Bank. Conversations in our social community, I would say for our bank are very different from many other financial institutions, from social justice issues to criminal reform. Sometimes it's really difficult, especially in the social media space, to find the joy, to find the good, to find the thing to celebrate. We work really hard to find those things and share them with our community. We realized how important it is to be unapologetically black and just celebrate that when I look at our debit cards, how powerful it is to see myself reflected on my form of payment that I use every day. One of the big pieces of our mission is to bring financial literacy to our community in a way that is digestible. We use the Salesforce platform to support our mission every day and built building out our advocate program. We focus in the program on rewarding people for doing the things that we believe will help set them up for generational wealth building. The pandemic impacted us in a big way, but we were prepared for it because we were built to scale. The entire back end of our organization is built on Salesforce. We had the infrastructure already. The technology was there. It was merely tweaking it. And we built a PPP program and launched it in 72 hours. Our first PPP loan went to a single mother who was an uber driver. And I remember when I read this story, I was like, this is why I work here. Service cloud has given us a single source of truth and helps us better understand our customer. We brought on more than 60,000 new customers during the pandemic because people weren't safe going into buildings and so they very quickly had to shift to Internet banks. And our call center teams worked tirelessly to meet our customer need, but we had to scale. But they did an amazing job using Salesforce to identify how we needed to ramp how we needed to build. At the end of the day, we more than doubled our call center team to handle this new volume to handle these new customers to be able to provide them with a kind of service that they needed. We all want each other to succeed. I think that's a unique place for any organization to be in that your customers want you to be successful like you want your customers to be successful.

60,000 new customers. It's what every company dreams of. Rochelle's leadership inspired that success and she inspired our top three tips this episode. Tip Number one Make Service Personal Customer service managers can personalize engagement to support every customer no matter what, using tools to strengthen that engagement like automation, customer interactions on any channel, even the power of AI. After all, service teams are at the heart of putting customers at the center of your organization. That also means making the most of your customers time. Because if you could solve an issue on your own like checking on a loan application status, you would, right? I know I would. That brings us to our second tip. Help customers help themselves Just like One United Many banks offer paycheck protection program loan applications or PPP directly from their online portal. Let's see how self service with a little help from AI powered chatbots make delivering great customer service fast and easy without ever being put on hold. Beth logs on to her online banking portal to view her application status. Because the portal is natively connected to Customer 360, Beth has mission critical information at her fingertips. She notices the application is on hold and waiting for her tax returns to be fully processed. Beth isn't sure how far back she needs to go on her tax returns. Luckily, the channel menu provides options to instantly connect with the bank to get her questions answered. When Beth selects chat, she's greeted by an AI powered chatbot. The bot recognizes Beth because it's connected directly to her data in Salesforce. It uses natural language processing to analyze her question and respond immediately. And just like that, Beth resolves her issues without ever speaking to an agent and is one step closer to securing her loan. But when you grow as fast as One United bank did, there are bound to be customers who need a more personal touch. Well, that's what our third tip is all about. Swarm for volume. Once you've connected all your data across departments and backend systems into a single source of truth, you can track everything about a customer. Assets, orders, history. And teams can swarm on cases so all those new customers aren't left waiting. And with Slack, first service agents can share insights even faster.

I don't know that I would have been able to get through this year mentally if I hadn't worked at One United Bank. This has been part of who we have always been, which is focused on empowering our community, the black community. That's not to say that we don't support everyone, but sometimes you need to focus on the ones who need the most help, right? My name is Rochelle Hines and you're watching.

Simply put, Rochelle, that was amazing. Thank you. Customer service social, a bank and service cloud, some kind of combination. Thanks, Nicole, as well for the inside look at how all those connected One United. This season we highlighted One United bank and learned tons about customer service and how crucial it is for every company, especially ones handling people's money. We also learned how service cloud can drive growth and boost customer satisfaction. Well, it's the end of our season. I know. I hate to see it end. But hey, there's some good news. We'll be back soon to explore another innovative company doing more innovative things. Thank y' all for watching this season of Simply Put. I'm Emmanuel Acho. We'll see you next time.