CU NextGen Engage 2025 Day 3: The Human Side of Technology

By John San Filippo

The final day of CU NextGen Engage 2025, held August 25-27 in Cincinnati, continued the conference’s focus on practical, credit union-led innovation. While the previous day’s sessions explored strategic approaches to data and member relationships, Wednesday’s presentations delved into the essential human elements of technology. Sessions from Altra Federal Credit Union and Meritrust Credit Union provided attendees with detailed frameworks for optimizing vendor partnerships and driving the user adoption necessary to make any technology investment successful.

Altra CU’s Alternative to the ‘Rip and Replace’ Mentality

Dawn Fread, SVP, strategy and innovation at Onalaska, Wis.-based Altra Federal Credit Union ($3 billion; 157,000 members) addressed a dilemma familiar to many in the industry: how to meet increasing member expectations with systems that struggle to keep up. The common reaction is often to seek a new vendor, but Fread urged attendees to proceed with caution.

Dawn Fread

“Switching vendors can be very costly and risky,” she stated. She detailed the extensive resources required, from time-consuming RFPs and demos to the unforeseen expenses of implementation and customization. A significant, often overlooked cost is the “relationship reset,” where a credit union must start from scratch building rapport and strategic alignment with a new partner.

Instead of choosing between struggling with an existing system or starting over, Fread presented a third option: optimization. “I’m not talking about settlings,” she clarified. “I’m talking about really looking at what those underutilized features and functionalities are.”

The core of her message was to first look inward. She shared a powerful example where the credit union mapped its internal process for a simple member address change and found it to be incredibly complex. Initially, they blamed their software.

“In the end, we didn’t have to change our software; it was our process that was the problem,” she revealed. By re-engineering their internal workflow, Altra saved thousands of dollars and avoided an unnecessary vendor change.

This internal focus is complemented by a deep, strategic partnership with existing vendors. Fread repeatedly emphasized the importance of collaboration. “I can’t say enough that you have to treat [tech vendors] as your strategic partner in order to get to the level that you want to be at with your products,” she advised. This partnership model allowed Altra to co-develop an in-branch account opening system with CU NextGen that solved a major pain point for retail staff, particularly with complex business accounts.

The credit union also explored new services from CU NextGen. After a visit to Space Coast Credit Union in Florida to learn about that credit union’s use of CU NextGen’s Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), a team from Altra formed the “GATOR Group” (Grow Altra Through Other Resources) to identify and vet processes that could be handled by CU NextGen’s BPO team.

Fread admitted that optimization has its limits, offering a clear guideline for when to move on. “If you’re not using 75 to 80% of your system, you probably want to look at what’s out there,” she concluded.

Meritrust CU’s Masterclass in CRM Adoption

Building on their colleagues’ presentation from the previous day about the high-level strategy behind a CRM, a second team from Wichita, Kan.-based Meritrust Credit Union ($2.2 billion; 123,000 members) delivered a practical follow-up focused on the biggest challenge in enterprise technology: user adoption. The session was led by Senior CRM Product Manager Lauren Jones, CRM Product Owner Ricquel Smith, and Vice President of Growth Strategies Emily Stewart. Stewart noted the all-too-common narrative of CRM projects becoming a “failure to launch,” with many credit unions purchasing a system that never goes live or sees meaningful use.

Emily Stewart

Meritrust avoided this fate with a dual approach, Stewart noted. First, leadership set a clear, top-down mandate. “From jump, our CEO said adoption is not optional,” she said. This established an unambiguous expectation that every employee would use the CRM for every member interaction.

The second part of their strategy was a sophisticated, bottom-up effort to understand and empower their users through a methodology known as “design thinking.” This human-centered approach involves empathizing with users, defining their problems, ideating solutions, and then rapidly prototyping and testing.

Lauren Jones

The team conducted focus groups and user interviews across every department to understand how staff felt about the CRM. This initial research led them to identify three user segments: frequent, moderate, and occasional users. However, a pivotal moment came during a stakeholder feedback session when a director asked a critical question. Jones recalled the moment: “Why is my team an occasional user? I do everything in the CRM that I’ve been onboarded to do. What else can I do? How can I become a frequent user?”.

This insight revealed their initial segmentation was inequitable; it unfairly compared a retail employee who is in the CRM all day with a back-office staff member with a different workflow. This led the team back to the drawing board. Smith explained their new problem statement: “How might we better define our user segments so that we can better understand our CRM usage?” The solution was to create new, more relevant user groups: retail, back-office sales, and back-office support. This allowed for fair comparisons and provided a clearer picture of adoption across the organization.

Ricquel Smith

This refined, data-driven oversight paid immediate dividends. Smith shared a case study involving the wealth management team, whose CRM usage was low. By working with CU NextGen to enhance the CRM’s campaign module to automatically deliver sales leads, Meritrust gave the team a powerful new reason to engage with the system. The result was a $36,000 return and a 20% increase in frequent users on that team within two months. The success was so profound, Smith noted, that it empowered the credit union to challenge its sales teams to “ditch their sales spreadsheets” and fully commit to the CRM.

Stewart summarized their success with three key pillars: “There’s obviously strategy. We also need to have expectations set. But the other part is really about oversight.”