My Future Branches Story by Tammy Phelps:

This was my first time attending the conference…

I first heard about the event when one of the sales reps for Future Branches reached out to me via LinkedIn. I had been looking for events that focused on member experience and the agenda for this conference impressed me with the diversity of speakers and the way it covered all aspects of the subject.

The format of the event really focused on facilitating interaction between attendees…

Like I said, the variety of speakers meant that everyone felt like they had some representation on the agenda – large financial institutions to small credit unions. And if you were shy navigating the larger networking sessions, there were other smaller breakfasts and lunches where you could feel more comfortable discussing challenges in a more intimate setting. The moderators at these sessions made an effort to engage everyone in the discussions so you heard the varied perspectives.

I left the conference with copious amounts of notes and armed with resources should I need to bounce off a couple of ideas in the future.

We’re already working on implementing some of the ideas gained from the conference….

At our credit union, we’re focused on growth, technology and culture. By attending the conference, I was able to confirm that we were headed in the right direction by adopting certain strategies. But I also gained a notebook full of ideas that we may look to implement in the future.

We’ve already started on two ideas gained from the conference:

1. A member scheduling platform: Something that we’ve realized we need in order to continue providing an excellent member experience. We’re interviewing vendors who can help set this up and hope to have it implemented soon.
2. Better acoustics in our branch lobbies: this is a simple yet effective design fix that we’ve been looking to rectify for a while. The idea for using a different component came about in my chats with one of the vendors at the event. We’re now planning on installing the new component in the lobby of one of our branches to test if it will help resolve the acoustics issue.

I will be returning to the event in 2019…

I truly enjoyed my time at the conference. My colleague and I gained a lot in terms of educating ourselves on what’s available in technology and design. We hope to return in 2019 to continue to expanding our knowledge and sharing our expertise.