Community First Credit Union’s path to enhancing member experiences and digital transformation

Building on previous Siteimprove success

Member-owned Community First Credit Union (CFCU) is home to approximately 556 employees and has 26 branches throughout Northeastern Wisconsin. Headquartered in Neenah, CFCU is focused on digital transformation and providing the same highly acclaimed experience online as they do in person.

To deepen relationships with members across all product lines and attract new members, CFCU set out to launch a modern, user-centric website. Midway through the project, CFCU brought on Rose Kilsdonk, Vice President of Special Projects, to join CFCU in its website reimagination effort. Kilsdonk had extensive experience using Siteimprove for content audit and discovery tasks, as well as to gain visibility into site issues, improve quality assurance, enhance accessibility, and uncover opportunities for digital optimization.

“In my past position, I had already seen Siteimprove’s inventory management give my team visibility to more than 26,000 assets on a complex site. It helped us conduct an audit so we could bring only the freshest content to the new site,” said Kilsdonk. “I knew the addition of Siteimprove at CFCU would be vital to achieving the success metrics we’d put in place for the web project.”

Kilsdonk and the five-person website project team, including Vice President of Digital Marketing Steve Zich, immediately saw the value Siteimprove could provide if used to its full extent.

“With our old site, we couldn’t track, audit, or see under the hood,” said Zich. “With our new website and Siteimprove, we could do all that to provide the exceptional experiences our members and visitors expect.”

Since digital transformation can be especially taxing for a small, internal marketing team, productivity and efficiency were key in this project. Monitoring all the moving pieces — from quality assurance, to accessibility, to SEO — can take significant staff dedication and management of many different systems. But with Siteimprove's all-in-one platform, the CFCU team is now able to effectively manage all of these functions on a daily basis.

Leveraging an all-in-one platform’s wide-ranging functionality

With Siteimprove added to the new website plan, the team went to work right away on the staging development site to ensure everything was set up properly before publishing. Siteimprove technology gave CFCU the confidence to go live without a single hiccup.

Today, the CFCU team finds Siteimprove’s behavior maps within the analytics platform especially revealing. These visual heat maps help CFCU understand how its visitors interact with site content, which in turn allows the team to continually improve member experience.

CFCU also uses Siteimprove to actively monitor new crawl reports so they can fix errors quickly. To keep everyone aligned in providing a superior member experience, the team regularly pulls and shares readability reports with their colleagues on the communications team. They also use the policy functionality to establish quality assurance measures for any information changes.

Regarding meta tags, Siteimprove also provides helpful pre- and post-launch tools, allowing CFCU to monitor its inventory of description and alt tags to gain perspective on their overall SEO health and take action to improve.

Making measurable progress toward digital transformation

In the first three months following the new website launch, CFCU has already seen measurable improvements to their digital experience. CFCU’s DCI score has increased by nearly 55%, now well over the industry’s benchmark. They have also achieved a 99.5 score for quality assurance and improved their SEO score by more than 22 points.

While the team is continuously collecting data trends, CFCU has already seen increased site traffic since the launch. They’ve been able to grow membership and relationships through the site in a way they previously weren’t able to.

“Using Siteimprove allows us to surpass doing just a good job and set our sights on doing an excellent governance job, enhancing our organization’s digital presence,” said Kilsdonk.