Collaborating for better customer service with Office 365

Today's post was written by Matt McCombs, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at DHCU Community Credit Union

According to industry research from the Raddon Financial Group, the DHCU Community Credit Union is in the top 5 percent for sales and in the top 10 percent for service scores. We have deep roots in the community and have successfully built long-term relationships with our members through our excellent service. To maintain this track record, and support our growth, -we built two new branches in 2012 - we replaced our outdated, on-premises email solution.

We knew we needed to provide new collaboration tools for employees, such as real-time options for communicating within a branch office as well as between branches. Many of our employees work in branch locations but report to a supervisor in headquarters. We also needed better mobile access to email on employees' preferred devices and an intranet-based collaboration platform to build efficiencies in our business workflows.

We decided against upgrading our existing email solution because it didn't interoperate well with our call center solution, and we wanted to move away from on-premises solutions. We liked that Office 365 offers cloud-based communication and collaboration technologies in one suite of services. The fact that it has allowed us to boost productivity while reducing the expense and burden of managing an on-premise infrastructure has been an added bonus.

Since we deployed Office 365 in January 2012, we have seen an increase in employee productivity. We used to waste time arranging meetings because no one updated their calendars. Now, instead of it taking a week, we can schedule meetings instantly through the calendaring service in Outlook. And I love the fact that I can use my mobile device to access and sync my emails when I'm travelling. We've never had that level of mobility before.

Lync Online has contributed to an increase in member satisfaction due to our ability to provide more responsive service, and we're using SharePoint Online to improve our outbound calling program. Through more efficient lead management workflows, we have been able to increase sales by 14 percent. We're also improving member service. Call center staff are using instant message (IM) capabilities to connect to colleagues to help them answer members' questions immediately. Our tellers use IM to alert lending officers when a credit union member has expressed interest in a product. It's been amazing to see how readily employees have adopted the suite of tools in Office 365 to streamline our business and allow us to focus on maintaining our tradition of great member service.

This post originally appeared on the Office 365 blog here. Read the full case study here.