First West Credit Union adopts critical Dynamics 365 process in seven weeks, lowers resolution time

Headquartered in Langley, British Columbia, First West Credit Union operates through four locally known brands to serve members across the province. Being rooted in the communities it serves has enabled First West to build local-market knowledge and establish authentic connections with its members.

Unlike a bank, a credit union is owned by its members, and First West has succeeded by emphasizing services and advice that reflect that difference. “We provide expert financial insight that’s holistic and highly personalized to those who live, work, and play in our communities,” says Chief Information Officer and Chief Transformation Officer Darrell Jaggers. “We work big and act local.”

That orientation, which has always been a key element of First West’s culture and its operations, is part of a vision First West believes is relevant across the entirety of Canada.

How does a large financial services institution hold onto an authentic, member-centric experience while pursuing a bold vision for growth? There are many facets to its strategy, one of which is to unify and scale the technologies it relies on to serve members. “First West is an organization built through mergers,” Jaggers explains. “Standardizing practices, processes, and tools is especially critical for us now, as we look to meet regulatory requirements at the federal level.”

Jaggers and his team identified First West’s customer relationship management (CRM) system as the place to start. “Member relationship management practices differed by region, and therefore we’ve had a patchwork of CRM deployments across the organization,” he explains. First West was already determined to serve its members better, and its growth ambitions became the catalyst for moving quickly. “One of the key requirements of federal oversight is the ability to maintain an accessible, fair, and transparent member complaints practice,” says Jaggers. “Iterating on our legacy CRM platform wasn’t going to get us where we need to be. We needed to take a big step forward.”

After a comprehensive request for proposal (RFP) process involving multiple vendors, First West decided to replace its earlier CRM solutions with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service. “We were supremely prepared in terms of understanding our needs and requirements, and we realized that Microsoft was the perfect choice,” Jaggers recalls. “Not just from a technology standpoint—we use Office 365 internally—but from a collaboration standpoint. They showed that they really understand our needs, our strategic priorities, and where we want to go. That was a driving factor in our decision."

Success in mapping functionality to business needs created 100% adoption within seven weeks

One of First West’s guiding principles for the implementation was to minimize customization. “One of the key value points of the Dynamics 365 platform is that, need for need, the capabilities are there,” says Jaggers. “We were able to map the functionality to the business needs very well, right out of the box. That really helped us fast-track this initiative.”

Jaggers is no stranger to CRM deployments. “These have always been my most hated types of enterprise deployments,” he laughs. “In my 35-year career, I’ve seen many of them fail to meet goals and expectations. There were always gaps between very particular business requirements and broad platform capabilities, and we had to fill them with expensive customizations or complicated configurations. The balance of pragmatic expectations on our side and the ability of Dynamics 365 to meet them was the key to success.”

The implementation was completed in record time, according to Jaggers. “In my experience, these are typically 24-month journeys,” he explains. “We delivered a complaints management system—one of our key use cases—within a 6-month time frame, achieving a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Additionally, the initial deployment of our Sales system was completed in just 11 months. This expedited rollout enabled us to seamlessly transition from and decommission our outdated legacy CRM systems, marking a significant achievement in our digital transformation journey.”

First West had run both systems in parallel for more than five months, but rapid adoption of Dynamics 365 quickly rendered the previous system obsolete. “With Dynamics 365 Customer Service we hit 90% adoption in the first month,” says Keiko Nitta, Director of Member Advocacy at First West, “and within seven weeks, were at 100%. It was exciting to see so much success in such a short time.”

Dynamics 365 data drives insights, continuous improvement, and enhancements

One of the most critical benefits of running Dynamics 365 Customer Service is the ability to comply with federal requirements around complaints management. “We now have an SLA available to keep everyone on track to deliver a positive compliant experience while meeting regulatory requirements,” says Nitta. “This was our primary objective, and it wasn’t even possible before Dynamics 365.” Before Dynamics 365 was implemented, 49% of complaints were resolved in 14 days or less, but Nitta reports that 87% of complaints today are resolved in that time, well within the federal guidelines. The average turnaround time is 6 days for Branch and Call Centre teams, and all complaints are now resolved within 56 days.

As important, using Dynamics 365 Customer Service to comply with federal complaint-management requirements has led to exciting new possibilities for continuous improvement, such as turning complaints into insights, identifying and resolving irritants at scale to improve the member experience. “It’s a very meaningful way for us to engage with our members and understand their needs,” says Jose Carreres, Vice President of Digital Banking at First West. “We’ve actually come to realize opportunities, through the data that we’ve received, to align and make enhancements.”

For example, First West is using the data from complaints management to inform its use of Dynamics 365 Sales. “This is holistic,” says Jaggers. “Providing impactful financial advice that helps people flourish is the whole point of what we do, and Dynamics 365 has enabled us to link our products and services to the needs of our members in a much more effective way than we could do previously.

“We have a metric called ‘member needs served,’” explains Jaggers. “Knowing where our members’ last touchpoint was, where the conversation left off, and being able to pick that up seamlessly—in another channel, in another region, in another office—really strikes to the heart of what we do. It’s a competitive advantage for us.”

“Every time we onboard a new member, we use Dynamics 365 to really understand what their needs, concerns, and goals are,” says Carreres. “We call it Member Discovery and it’s been utilized so much recently, because it helps us move from simply meeting members’ basic needs to more of a financial services advisory model approach, where we can help them more proactively with clearer focus on their long-term financial wellbeing.”

First West’s Member Discovery process is fueled by a feature within Dynamics 365 that uses AI to provide a 360-degree view of the customer and enable robust interactions. In a vivid and recent example, a First West advisor was able to discover—and relieve—an institutional member’s frustrations with the tax implications of their mortgage and investment scenarios. For another advisor, the manual reporting process used to take 20 minutes, but member discovery now takes only a few minutes with Dynamics 365 Sales, driving productivity gains of more than 75%. Within the first month of launching Dynamics 365 Sales, First West’s advisors had completed more than 2,600 member discoveries, marking a 54% surge in adoption compared to the previous approach.

As First West strives to become a federally regulated financial institution with the ability to operate beyond the provincial borders of British Columbia, growth will likely come, in part, from further mergers. “We will always look for like-minded credit unions that share the same philosophies as we do,” says Jaggers. “We’re going to be able to touch more Canadians with the way we do business, and as the world becomes ever more digital, we’ll be able to do it consistently across all of our delivery channels. It’s another way to scale that we couldn’t have done previously.”

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