Put Your Agent Experience First

By Amita Aggerwal, Head of Content Marketing, Eltropy

As a leader, you're constantly juggling priorities – growth, profitability, innovation, and of course, member experience. But while chasing goals and making decisions at breakneck speed, one critical factor often gets sidelined: Your agent experience.

When this gets deprioritized, the ripple effects are immediate and long-lasting – overworked teams, rising attrition, low morale, and declining productivity. Simply put, even the best strategy can fall apart if the people executing it are overwhelmed.

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

– Peter Drucker

Over the past few years, Eltropy has spoken with leaders at over 1,000 credit unions and community banks across the country. One theme comes up time and time again:

Agents are frustrated by outdated, clunky systems that make it hard to find even basic information policies, procedures, product details, and previous member interactions. Without quick access to what they need, agents are left scrambling. This slows them down and directly impacts the service your members receive.

Let’s call out the elephant in the room.

The Big Bank Expectation vs. Credit Union Reality

Big banks and fintechs have the budget and manpower to turn every conversation into data, and every data point into a strategic insight. They can fine-tune their service in real time, leveraging AI, historical trends, and behavioral analytics to offer seamless support.

Meanwhile, your agents are expected to deliver the same level of service, without the same tools or support. The result? Your team is stuck playing catch-up.

They’re overwhelmed, under-informed, and often frustrated. Without the right information at their fingertips, their ability to confidently serve members suffers. And when agent morale dips, member experience does too.

And it’s not just the tools they lack – it’s the mountain of internal knowledge they can’t access when they need it most.

You’ve Grown. So Has Your Information.

As you grew and your members evolved, you added more products and services, which led to the accumulation of tons of information on your end. Policies. Procedures. Compliance guidelines. Past member interactions. Training documents. That knowledge is vital for your team to do their job, yet it’s often trapped in silos: buried in email threads, locked in PDFs, scattered across outdated intranets, or worse, stored in someone’s head.

It’s tempting to shrug this off as just part of “how we work now.” But the cost of working this way? Higher than you think.

The Hidden Drain: The “Toggle Tax”

Let’s rewind for a second. Forget about deep data insights or predictive analytics. What about just finding the correct answer to a simple member question?

How many windows, tabs, systems, or Slack messages does your agent have to dig through to get that one answer? 100? 500? 1000?…

According to a study published in Harvard Business Review, employees at a Fortune 500 company toggled between applications over 3,600 times a day. That number may be different at your credit union, but the frustration is familiar.

This isn’t just wasted time. It’s wasted focus, energy, and trust. And while some agents get better at navigating this maze over time, the truth is: Members don’t have time for agents-in-training. They expect answers. Now.

Solution: AI-Powered Knowledge Assistants

The financial services landscape is changing rapidly – products have evolved, regulations have been updated, and systems have been replaced. Keeping your frontline team informed in real-time can feel like trying to catch water with a sieve.

You can’t just keep throwing more people or platforms at the problem. It doesn’t scale. You’ll end up overloading a few “go-to” experts and risking burnout – or worse, knowledge loss when they leave.

What if instead, you could create 100 mini-experts, instantly? That’s what GenAI makes possible.

Don’t Make Your Agents Know Everything. Just Help Them Access It Instantly.

Your agents don’t need to memorize every policy or procedure. They just need one reliable source where they can get the right answer, instantly. That’s where Eltropy’s GenAI Knowledge Assistant comes in. This AI-powered assistant:

• Consolidates all your institutional knowledge into one searchable platform – no manual data entry needed
• Delivers instant, accurate responses by reading both structured and unstructured data (PDFs, chats, policies, etc.)
• Fits into your existing workflows, so your team doesn’t have to change how they work to get the help they need
• Understands the language of credit unions, with built-in CFI-specific NLP and NLU
• Provides proactive, context-aware suggestions, not just answers

Better Employee Experience = Better Member Experience

In a recent webinar, Brad Shafton, SVP of IT & Digital at Magnifi Financial, put it best:

"The employee experience is what creates the member experience. The better experience the employees have, the more information they have at their fingertips, or the more they are able to get involved in conversations, their satisfaction increases, which then allows them to give a better experience to our members, that’s where it starts.

– Brad Shafton, SVP, IT & Digital, Magnifi Financial CU

When you empower your team with the right tools, magic happens:

• Faster resolutions = happier members
• Consistent, confident service = brand trust
• Reduced dependency on “experts” = better collaboration and resilience

What Can This Look Like at Your Credit Union?

Want to see how this would work for your teams, departments, and members? Let’s talk. Speak with an Eltropy expert to discover:

• Create specialized AI bots for each role or department based on knowledge needs
• Surface compliance risks, member sentiment trends, and service gaps through interaction intelligence
• Unlock real ROI from the conversations you’re already having – without disrupting your existing tech stack

Your members deserve great experiences. Your agents deserve great tools. Let’s make both happen.

Connect with Eltropy to learn more.