Greetings,
I want to update you on the status of our new primary computer system for maintaining your deposit and loan accounts.
As you know, we upgraded to our new system on August 1st and were closed for 2 days as part of that process. When we opened again on August 3rd, we experienced more member lobby and phone traffic than we could have ever predicted.
I would like to acknowledge that many members had significant disruptions in their services from Northwoods Credit Union during this upgrade period. While these issues have been relatively quickly resolved, the concern it caused our members was regrettable.
The biggest disruption was with members having difficulties signing into their online/mobile banking. These difficulties for the most part came from being locked out due to too many failed attempts to login, members not knowing their login ID, and having difficulty uninstalling our old mobile banking app and installing our new app.
We are sincerely sorry for those who experienced these difficulties, however, by the 3rd full business day of reopening, it appeared most members had logged in and were able to use the service.
The other significant difficulties experienced by some members had to do with our debit card program where we also switched to a new processor for better service in the future.
To understand the issues surrounding this it will be helpful to briefly explain how the debit card system works.
When we switched our processor, it can take some time for the “general debit card system” to pass on our card identifiers to the local retailers and/or for the retailers to update their terminals. Because of this, members had times where their card would not be recognized.
The other issue that happened was that the fraud detection protections built into our new processor’s system had difficulties in some cases determining if a transaction was a valid one or not. While this normally is a good thing, the problem here was that our new processor had no history of our members’ use of their cards to make that determination more accurate.
The combination of the new online banking login and the debit card service disruption caused a surge in members trying to get ahold of us through phone, email, and texting. Initially, our call center was not able to keep up with the amount of communication.
To help with this additional communication we had employees working overtime to return calls and had employees from other departments help and staying late as well.
Even with these additional measures, we were unable to keep up and return calls the same day until the week after the upgrade.
I am happy to say that these two significant issues have been resolved.
We are continuing to work on some less impactful issues that always come with an upgrade as extensive as this one was.
We are looking forward to the many benefits this new system will provide us in order to be ready for the future and for us to be able to bring you even better services in the years to come.
Some of these benefits include being a more efficient system for employees once they’ve become familiar with it, the online & mobile banking is better able to move forward as technology changes, and finally, reduced costs going forward.
I do want to recognize our staff who worked through a few very tough days with a very positive attitude and who always strived to help our members as best they could.
Finally, I want to thank you, our members, for your patience and support. Our members have always appreciated our values and the way we provide personal service.
I commit to you that we will keep our focus on that same personal service and that every decision we make will be made with our members’ best interest in mind.
Sincerely,
– Doug Wolf
Read more about our system upgrade