Sound Credit Union Securely Shares Knowledge Across Branches

Sound Credit Union is a Washington state-based financial services provider. They are locally owned, not-for-profit, and known for their friendly customer service. They have over 120,000 members and provide nationwide access to their services through 5,000 shared branching locations.

The Challenge

Sound Credit Union realized that they had a knowledge sharing problem after conducting an employee survey that revealed “finding information” was employees’ biggest pain point. At the time, they were using an outdated SharePoint site that made it difficult to find content unless you knew its file name or what folder it lived in.

Being able to find information quickly is mission-critical to Sound Credit Union, as their local customer service is a differentiator for them, and their members count on them to have answers at their fingertips. Additionally, financial industry regulations meant they needed a secure information sharing platform that would make it easy to keep content up-to-date so that they could stay in compliance.

The Solution

Sound Credit Union chose to replace their out-of-date SharePoint site with Bloomfire. They now use Bloomfire to share knowledge not only across their corporate office but also with branch managers at their brick-and-mortar locations.

Bree Long, Digital Systems Analyst, says that one of the deciding factors for Sound Credit Union was Bloomfire’s smart search, which allows them to search for words and phrases within any type of document or video, rather than being limited to searching by file name or folder. “Bloomfire’s search gives me the confidence…that the information provided to me will be relevant,” says Bree.

Bloomfire’s Q&A feature, which deep indexes all questions and answers in the platform so that they can easily be found with a keyword search, has also been valuable to Sound Credit Union. “Bloomfire is driving innovation because people are feeling empowered to get their ideas out there and ask questions,” Bree says. “Users feel comfortable asking questions organization-wide through the platform that they may not feel comfortable asking through a different channel.”

Bloomfire is driving innovation because people are feeling empowered to get their ideas out there and ask questions.

Bree notes that Bloomfire also helps Sound Credit Union stay in compliance through a few key features. Bloomfire’s scheduling tool allows Sound Credit Union to save a draft of a contribution and publish it as soon as a regulation goes into effect—or schedule a contribution to be unpublished when time-sensitive information becomes outdated. This prevents any delays in information and ensures that employees aren’t accessing and share out-of-date content.

Additionally, Bloomfire allows Sound Credit Union’s employees to flag posts for review if they find outdated policies or information, giving the credit union an extra level of crowdsourced assurance that the information they’re sharing is up-to-date and accurate. If there are any disputes or discrepancies, Sound Credit Union can review previous versions of all content in Bloomfire to see when a change was made compared to when a policy went into effect.

Since Sound Credit Union has been using Bloomfire, their staff’s trust in the relevancy of shared content has increased, according to Bree. And as a result of that increased confidence, customer-facing staff provide quick and efficient service to Sound Credit Union’s members. “Our staff is easily able to find the procedures they need to assist members, and they also know that the information they are looking at is the most current,” says Bree.