Ann-Marie Katzer

Ann-Marie Katzer is the Vice President of Retail Sales and Service for American Eagle Financial Credit Union overseeing the Branch Network and the Member Sales and Service Contact Centers including our Loan Phone Center, Member Contact Center and Operations Resource Center. American Eagle FCU is the largest credit union in Connecticut with over 150,000 members and over $1.9 billion in assets and was voted one of the Hartford Business Journal's Best Places to Work in CT 3 years in a row. Ann-Marie earned her Bachelors of Science degree in Social Work from St. Joseph College in CT, her Masters degree in Social Work as an Administration major from Fordham University in NYC and is a 2007 CUNA Management School graduate. Ann-Marie will be celebrating her 29th year of service with the credit union in 2019. In her 28 year tenure at AEFCU, Ann-Marie has spent most of her time in the Retail division, specifically, Branches and Administration. Her specialties are in management and staff development, she additionally is a trainer, Field Coach working with all member facing and support staff members, has developed and facilitated many sales/service incentive programs, is a Financial Literacy teacher and also led the Employee Engagement team for American Eagle Financial Credit union. 

In 2014, Ann-Marie and her colleagues at American Eagle Financial  Credit Union working together with  Schneider Sales and Service to shift the sales/service culture at American Eagle. Throughout the years, Ann-Marie and the American Eagle team created and implemented the INSPIRE program -this acronym stands for "Identify Needs, Seek Possibilities, Increase Results Everytime". Through the INSPIRE program initiative, American Eagle trained with Schneider's staff to become certified trainers of various Schneider sales/service classes and have now trained member facing staff on Schneider S & S Retail Selling, Referral Selling, Frontline Coaching, Sales Management and Advanced Sales Management classes among others and Support staff on delivering Quality Service to our internal customers. Ann-Marie and the team have created a New Member Profile process, a Referral Program and both an Intranet Portal page containing resources for all staff related to Sales & Service and an INSPIRE newsletter crafted monthly with training tips, coach's corner strategies for management, success stories of staff utilizing Preferred Way of Selling and Service techniques. A Goal and Incentive plan was created and has been in full swing for all member facing staff as part of our rewards and recognition component of the INSPIRE program.

American Eagle staff and the INSPIRE team led by Ann-Marie also shifted their attention to Behavioral Interviewing, another Schneider Sales and Service class they recently trained to be certified in and In 2015 the credit union fully implemented a new hiring program to attract and hire those applicants who would be most successful if hired into a Sales role.

Finally, one of the most recent initiatives Ann-Marie Led involved “right sizing” branches and changing our branch model to represent “today’s” member needs and the increase in technological offerings. We introduced VTMs (Video Teller Machines) and piloted them in a Technology Center building for Pratt & Whitney where we do not have a branch location but many members employed there. Ann-Marie’s specialty is to “Provide technology but with the Human Touch”. There have since been other deployments and the Video Financial representatives operating the units are part of our Member Sales and Service Center. They are specifically trained to engage our members utilizing this new channel. AEFCU will be opening a branch with 2 VTMs deployed in drive thru, offering extended hours this summer to continue building our fleet.