Tech Talk: Online Meetings Serve Clients

By Elizabeth Wasserman

A Connecticut based information technology company that serves community banks and credit unions found online meetings not only helped save travel costs but allowed the firm to be more accessible to clients.

COCC, of Avon, Conn., provides information technology services to community banks and credit unions to help process checking accounts, debit card transactions, loan accounts, ATM transactions and more. The company's use of online meetings, says vice president Brent Biernat, has allowed COCC to better service customers, avoid travel costs, and expand its offerings to existing customers.

Elizabeth Wasserman: Tell me about COCC and how you use technology.

Brent Biernat: COCC is a cooperative data center for financial institutions, banks, and credit unions. We provide their transaction processing for them. If you go to a community bank in Connecticut, New England, Ohio, New York, or the Northeast, there is a good chance that your transaction is being processed by COCC. We've been around for 40 years and have about 350 employees.

Wasserman: Why did you invest in a virtual meeting service?

Biernat: Every company in the world says they are very concerned about customer service, and as a cooperative we live and breathe customer service. The presidents of all these financial institutions sit on our board of directors. They fill out report cards about our service. We want to be able to stay high touch as we continue to add more credit unions. We want to be able to communicate with them more readily. And there was a great technology to enable us to do it from GoToMeeting. If you try to do this on a regular phone and conference call, you lose something. You don't have that collaboration.

Wasserman: How do you use it?

Biernat: We do a lot of it with our customers. There are various reasons. We do a lot of online training with them to show them a new feature in or product or to give them an update. We use it to introduce them to a new product or show them an entire demonstration. And we also use it to do regular collaboration if we have a project going on with them. We set it up and all join together and we can have some webpages or material in front of us that everyone can see. We also use it internally if we have a lot of production items we want to review and make changes to. In the past, what we'd have to do is gather in a conference room and huddle around for a discussion with a few callers on speaker phones. We have several buildings on our campus. It wastes productivity if you're trying to have a meeting and gather everyone in a room and you don't realize how much time that costs when you can have an online meeting with these same folks and they can join in right from their desks. They don't have to spend that time walking and socializing. It's much more efficient.

Wasserman: What have the results been?

Biernat: Essentially, it's saved us a significant amount of money and still helped us to maintain a very high touch with our customers. In the past, we used a rival technology and an average meeting cost us $250. We found this easier for our customers to use. We've saved lots in terms of travel costs alone. Every time we get in a car or on a plane it ends up costing a lot. We figure we've saved about $3,000 a month in travel costs. The flip side of that is that we still want to get our executives out in front of our customers so they still have meetings where they have face-to-face time but during the travel time back, they can call in and be part of the regular internal meetings or join another customer call.

Wasserman: How long have you been using virtual meetings?

Biernat: We've been using this technology for four years now. We pay a flat monthly fee per host for the service and can host unlimited meetings. We've really incorporated it into our overall strategy. As a financial services company, we're always concerned about pandemic planning and we've made sure we're set up for it. The virtual meetings are a piece of that. If swine flu seriously increased, it would allow us to have meetings without being face to face in a closed room.