Session Recap: Omnichannel Realization: Key Takeaways from Ami Iceman-Haueter, Michael Stojda at Future Branches Boston 2025

2025, Future Branches Boston. Case Study – A Pragmatic and Cost-effective Approach to Omnichannel Realization

Ami Iceman-Haueter, Chief Experience and Research Officer, MSUFCU: Okay. Next we have a case study, a pragmatic and cost-effective approach to omnichannel realization. Please welcome Michael and Amy to the stage.

Michael Stojda, President & CEO, Exagens: There we go. Perfect. Okay. This is gonna be a little bit of a different kind of session, and what I mean by that is that if you were like me, you heard this morning talking about personalization and data and AI and all of that, and not that long ago I was in your seats and I'd come out of a conference like this saying, wow, that's all wonderful.

I'm excited, and I get back to the office and then reality hits. Data's a mess. Technology, it's a little creaky around the corners, and it's not like we have people sitting around with nothing else to do that are gonna be sitting there waiting to implement it. And hence the word pragmatic. And we need to be pragmatic because this is the competition out there.

That's a next best action or offer from Chase. That went to my niece, 32 years old. The exact type of person you as community bankers want is your next generation, and that's a billion dollars of technology behind that. And it's really good of the 38 cards that Chase has to offer, that was actually the exact right one for my niece.

I know. 'cause I talked to her. We went through it. She knew her situation. They did a phenomenally good job of targeting the who, the what, the where, and the when. Now that I've got you depressed for a second the reality is, given all that technology, and we'll talk about it, a 50% improvement of conversion rate went from 1% to 1.5%.

That still means it fails 98% of the time. Why is that? What's missing from there is the human element, and as community bankers, this is your forte. This is the place to lean into. Because what happens when we talk to people in banking terms, we confuse them. We don't take the emotional account in. I like to say, what does 1.5% cashback mean to the average human?

Nothing. And we can do a lot better than that. Next to the Chase example, this example with what we do at Exogen, this is taking the human element into account, right? The first thing, and I'm, the only thing I'll point out on this slide right away is notice it doesn't say percentages anywhere. It talks about how much money, $440 cash we can put into a member or a customer's hand.

Now, what's not obvious from there is there are eight different behavioral science techniques buried into it. As a company, that's our forte. It's really taking behavioral science. Marrying with it. Excuse me, I'm gonna say it. Ai, although we've developed something called, we call artificial emotional intelligence to better engage people and to help them.

So that's the background for it. And the punchline to that same example, one point a half percent conversion, 4.7 conversion rate. That's the actual conversion rate that Amy here from MSU they're experiencing. And that's. Quick sorry, I just got ahead of myself. That one example, right? We can deliver that in various ways, different channels, and then feed that information to the retail channel in different ways.

This example, that's email. And that's part of the pragmatic approach and where we're gonna start this story. There are 320 plus of those sparks, those individual TAs I showed you that we do all the work to create and then provide them to you as a financial institution to distribute to your members. And with that, now I will introduce Amy from MSU.

Ami Iceman-Haueter, Chief Experience and Research Officer, MSUFCU: Hi all. I'm Amy Iceman. I'm the Chief Experience Officer at MSU Federal Credit Union. We've been a partner with Exigence for five years now and have seen some really incredible results as Mike alluded to. But I also always join Mike and try and be very realistic about the journey we took to get here because it is not as simple as snapping your fingers because as Mike alluded to, there are some rough around the edges.

Technology's in place and a little bit of lack of data and all of the things that just exist naturally in your environment. Now, finding partners that can work alongside you is really the goal. So I think we all believe that at some point, we all bought into the omnichannel unicorn, that there was this concept that we could get it all and have it all and exceed at all of it all of the time.

But the reality is we all fight with silos, even if we're really good at the communication part. We are really broken down into what each of our different areas want, right? Lending has a goal and all of these people have different goals from each other. How do we bring those together? And while we often look at the opportunity from a technology standpoint, we also really had to figure out a way to just get things into the market to try them, right?

And so I didn't want to have to fight against technology or compliance or all of those things, which. We do a really good job of, I wanted to see the actual results of what we could do with our members to help move our team along. And so that's why we started with email, which seems a little outdated and a little like, ugh, everyone gets a million and a half emails.

But the reality is it was an achievable. Marketable channel that was easy to access and easy to reach a large, broad audience with. We did crawl, walk, run when we land launched with Exogen. We sent it to a 10,000 members, then 50,000 members, and then a hundred thousand members until we scaled to our entire membership base in email.

And that has generated the results that I'm gonna share with you as we go through the next couple of minutes. So you'll actually see some of the opportunities in the emails we have here that are all unique sparks that are sent. Based on the member's activity. So what Mike and I would get as members will not be the same.

This is all pulling from the data we had on our members. We anonymize it so they don't touch any of the PII. They send it back. We send it to the unique member via email and they get sparks that are built just for them.

Michael Stojda, President & CEO, Exagens: Thanks. And a couple of key things just to point out around this. So those are three members taken at random.

That's what they're getting each month. And this isn't about personas, it's not about segmentation, it's about the individual. That's one. And the second, probably the biggest takeaway from this is why we call it pragmatic, is the biggest limitation isn't the technology, it's not the data. It's often ourselves.

And so what I'm hoping actually after this is gonna give you the hope to lean in to what you can do. And this is what all this presentation is about, is the art of the possible. Sorry to steal that term. So let's talk a little bit about the results and what you can achieve with what you have today.

So the first one, as Amy, you say email. We all have this prejudice against email. People go, Ugh, email. Who reads email. Especially younger generations, they don't read email anymore, right? They don't have the attention span. No. Forget perception. Let's talk the data and the reality, what that chart shows.

As Amy was saying over last year, we rolled it out to increasingly number of members. Two things in the colors, the bars in purple. That's the number of unique members each month engaging with the content, and it's growing because we're growing in audience. That green bar at the top right says about 64%.

It may be hard to read. That's the percentage of engagement each month, and you'll notice it's. Mostly consistent except for a little dip that we had for a couple months.

Ami Iceman-Haueter, Chief Experience and Research Officer, MSUFCU: We all make choices, don't we? So I, we had a lot of pushback from our team on sending two emails. So when we started the journey, we were sending two emails with sparks in them a month, the same email, to try and get that engagement rate.

And my team just kept pushing and saying it's taking up too much inbox space. But the reality of it was when we stop doing two emails is when that dip happens. Which only further proved the power of the email because as we started regenerating that activity, we've seen the uptick again.

So there is something to be said for testing. Would I do it again? Probably not, but I'm on stage to tell you now. So you can just take that lesson with you as you go. But it also really helped coach the team through the adoption of the technology, which was a big part of this relationship as well.

Michael Stojda, President & CEO, Exagens: So let's go a little bit more into this journey.

So once someone actually opened it for the first time, and it is a challenge to get people to open it the first time. Some of 'em thought it was spam, some of 'em thought of it was actually somebody spoofing them. We all have to be careful Once someone opened it and that was 75% over the entire member base over the course of a year, then there was a 77% of those members would continue open.

The majority would start, continue to engage it. And the reason why is because we're continually feeding them value. And the secret around continuing to value, provide them value. It's not just financial value. Nobody wants to hear about financial products and services every, did any of you wake up this morning saying, I can't wait to hear from my bank today about the latest offer they have because I was sleepless last night hoping I was gonna get that email.

No. Instead, we talk about things not just financial value, but emotional value. As I said, we're a behavioral science-based company, an emotional value. AKA triggering dopamine is done in a lot of ways, and so we have an entire category of sparks that are just about engagement. Here's an example of one, right?

It's called pizza professional. What we're reaching out, so here's a member who purchased pizza last month, and we're now reaching out to say, amongst our members here were the three most popular piece of places. Why are we doing that? As humans, we're curious what other people around us are doing, right?

Social proofing, all of those things. It's also a great opportunity to have the credit union, the bank, stay top of mind with the member and build that sense of community. 'cause we're saying amongst us, this is what it was like. And no matter what that person picked as their pizza place were framing as a positive emotion.

So in this case, this member actually went to a totally different pizza place and were saying, Hey. Great job. A good pizza. When you see one, you don't run with the crowd. I see some of you smiling, just hearing that. That's dopamine actually being triggered right there because we're saying, Hey, you're smart.

And as humans, we like to think we're smart. We like it even better when tell someone tells us we're smart. Now, one of the challenges in doing anything new, it's not just about the end user, it's also the employees.

Ami Iceman-Haueter, Chief Experience and Research Officer, MSUFCU: I will say this is one of the most. Coveted things that you can get within our credit union.

So we actually worked with Exigence to build a spark that is unique to our employees. So we have a cafe within our organization where you can go and get lunch or snacks or, and we call it the timeout Cafe. And we actually created a unique spark where we could tell our employees when they got their monthly email, where they ranked amongst the people who purchased within the cafe during the previous month.

This did a couple things. A, it taught them what the technology could do and understand. B, it caused a lot of competition. So now we also have a ranking board for the employees who wanted to be the top spender of the month or buy the most things. But it also got them comfortable talking about sparks with our members, and it got them engaged in the process themselves.

So a big part of all of our technology adoption is making sure our employees come along with us. On the journey, and this was a really cool way to not only demonstrate it to them, but put it into action and then create something that they look forward to, to stay engaged with the product and remember to keep it top of mind for the members as well.

Michael Stojda, President & CEO, Exagens: So we do a lot of in terms of financial wellness, and this is a great way for all of you to differentiate yourself. And here's just one tiny example. 23% of households in the US today have a food delivery subscription service. The average household spends about two and a half thousand dollars a year on subscriptions across all of them, yet thinks they're only spending half of that.

A great way to actually help guide members. This is our approach to financial wellness. In this case, what we're doing to this particular member was saying, Hey, you know what? Based on the two orders you made in the last few months, you may not be getting value out of your dash pass. Call to action right there, direct link to manage my subscription, right?

That's a selfless act when it comes from their financial institution and it sends the signal, I'm looking after you. Not just trying to make money off of you. You'll never get something like that from a chase and the results, and I don't have time to go through all of it, but here's one of the cool thing.

70% of people who we said, you aren't getting value, you may want to reconsider it. They canceled their subscription. Think of that. Put yourself in their shoes. Wow, you just helped me save some money because I didn't bother to look at my transactions and keep track of all these things. That's one aspect.

Of financial wellness from us. The second, and I'm gonna talk now in terms of the MU mutual benefit, we know the data, 45% plus or minus of households in the US don't have enough money set aside for an unexpected financial event. Talking to people, trying to educate them. Literacy. It doesn't work at scale, sorry to say.

But what we can do is take smaller moments here, we're just guiding members who don't have one month of expenses set aside to do that. What's interesting, the data here in a short amount of time, six months, almost 7,000 members with $10.8 million of deposits. And those are sticky deposits. That's not hot money.

Ami Iceman-Haueter, Chief Experience and Research Officer, MSUFCU: Our CFO loves that one. I will also share one of my biggest. Partnership goals is always looking at how we can use the technologies in unique ways. And so I often tell Mike and his team that they're both a channel and a product, right? So the sparks are unique and product based. They're all of, it's the specialization of what Exogen does.

But because we have this monthly engagement now with members where they're looking forward to these things, we're also to introduce. Education, but we're also able to introduce new products and get pick up along the lines of what can we be doing with other products that we have, and start targeting the right audience appropriately because now we know more about this member and their activity.

If we can get them to save, can we also get them to adopt a new technology? That is something we've been able to achieve with both the product and channel aspects of what ex Exogen can do.

Michael Stojda, President & CEO, Exagens: Now that we've set the stage in terms of engagement, that we've, in terms of helping make better financial decisions, that sets the stage of trust and engagement.

So when it comes time to talk about how do we basically get these members grow, wallet, share more products, this is what happens. 7% lift in terms of cards. Taking that example from earlier with close to a 5% conversion rate, that's providing value to the member and at the same time, value to the financial institution.

In the case of CDs, here was a cha, an outreach to members who had CDs, long-term CDs, but they were at a lower rate with another institution. And all we were doing was reaching out to them and talking to them how we can help them earn more money by opening up a cd and it didn't have to be the highest rate.

And that translates into deposits. Another one in terms of external car loans, reaching out to members who had car loans elsewhere. Because we can offer them a better rate. We can a win-win, bringing a loan into the financial institution, the credit union, and at the same time helping that member, right? So there's always a duality here and this colorful chart to put it as a big fit.

And it is a lot of color there. I admit. This is the voice of members talking about what's important to them. Typically, when we do marketing, we do campaigns, and if this 30 days we're gonna focus on CDs or whatever. In any given month, and this is what it looks at across all the members. This is how we're helping members in different opportunities, whether it's a card, whether it's a new loan, whether it's a deposit.

And so we're generating a lot of interest. And so the next thing, and I said this is gonna be pragmatic, you would think, wow, with all these warm qualified leads, we should put them into a CRM system.

Ami Iceman-Haueter, Chief Experience and Research Officer, MSUFCU: Yeah. I think some of us know that's not always the reality of where we're at. So we are actually in the middle of a CRM transition and we have looked at a lot of different options and really when Mike and I came together, I just told him like, this is not an option.

So what am I supposed to do with this data if I don't have anywhere to put it right now? But they did in fact solve that, and it really did come in a very simple. Excel spreadsheet where we could follow up with the warm leads to make sure we didn't lose anything in that transition and still be able to capitalize on those leads.

Michael Stojda, President & CEO, Exagens: And again, I'm gonna stress that word pragmatic. You don't necessarily need the CRM system to, I'm not saying it doesn't have its value, but don't let that be a limiter, right? This is all about actually talking to the right folks and being creative and co-creative, right? How do we solve this problem? I'm gonna skip this one 'cause we're running out of time.

I'll let you speak to this one.

Ami Iceman-Haueter, Chief Experience and Research Officer, MSUFCU: I would happily speak to this one. I will say the reason I always am game to get on stage and talk alongside Exigence is because we've seen real actionable results, right? We started with the unicorn, and as much as that is still my dream to make everything work everywhere all the time in the exact same way, this has also given us really tangible results and really great member feedback.

As you can see, we're getting. Really engaged members talking about the value of our partnership and staying with us and what they see us as in their lifestyle. And it was really just as simple as getting started, right? Getting started with an email. We're looking at those opportunities to integrate into online banking.

We're actually talking about integrating into our chatbot, Fran, but we started, and that was a big part of getting this feedback and what makes it so valuable to jump into this omnichannel experience, but in a really tangible way. Okay.

Michael Stojda, President & CEO, Exagens: And so if we look at what's our roadmap been like together, it's not that perfect picture, right?

It's a zigzag. We started with email, not digital banking next, not a CRM system next, but Excel, let's already start providing, and now we're going back to digital. Yes. And as you said, we're gonna see where we go next.

Ami Iceman-Haueter, Chief Experience and Research Officer, MSUFCU: We're gonna see where we go next. But I also think this is a great opportunity to talk about how you can centralize all.

Of your products and services and really get the right thing in front of the right member, but make it valuable to them so that when you go on to what's next, they already are educated about what to do with this, and you can build on that action alongside it.

Michael Stojda, President & CEO, Exagens: So I think we've got time for one question before I get tossed off the stage.

Any questions? No, this is, whoops. Lemme put that up. That's our contact information. Feel free to reach out to either of us if you want to hear a little bit more about this journey. We've been going down together.

Ami Iceman-Haueter, Chief Experience and Research Officer, MSUFCU: Thanks all.

Michael Stojda, President & CEO, Exagens: Thank you very much.

Ami Iceman-Haueter, Chief Experience and Research Officer, MSUFCU: Thank you so much Michael and Amy.