SCCU MEMBERS’ WATCHDOG
Watchdog is both a member–provided rating of SCCU's products and services and the philosophy behind SCCU’s approach to serving members.
Our commitment is to always watch out for the best interests of our members. Unlike a for-profit bank or other financial institution, we can place the interests of our members above making a profit for stockholders or outside investors.
What does this mean to you?
The Watchdog rating system is an exciting advance, based on the survey and review capabilities now available through the Internet. For 60 years, SCCU has facilitated financial business on behalf of our members within the communities we serve. This financial business reflects hundreds of millions of individual transactions and events, representing hundreds of billions of dollars of financial activity in our communities. Up until now, every one of those transactions was an isolated event. As a credit union – and therefore a cooperative – we desire to pool the buying power of our individual member transactions and experiences into something bigger, something that creates a "whole greater than the sum of its individual parts."
So what does that mean to you? With advances in communications technologies, we now are linking the individual experiences of our members together to accomplish three things:
- Enable members to benefit from others’ experiences. By utilizing ratings and reviews from our very own members, fellow members and those looking to join our credit union can gain knowledge and guidance as to how to apply the power of the credit union in ways that benefit their own households.
- Use the member experience feedback to apply the proper focus behind the scenes. One of the constant complaints we receive about big banks is that they treat customers like a commodity. As a credit union, we must always treat members as owners. What better way to ensure that we are focused only on treating members as owners than to publish our members’ perceptions about that very thing? We use the information you provide to make changes to our processes, communication, and sometimes even our products, to benefit the credit union as a whole.
Use the collective member experience to leverage member benefit. Our concept is to utilize the collective buying power created by the total number of interactions members complete in our local economy in order to create differentiated benefits on behalf of our members. We can do this by showing the impact that the hundreds of millions of dollars in commerce conducted by our members has on our local economy.
By linking our collective purchasing power to their livelihood, business providers (such as auto dealers and other merchants) will realize the benefit of treating Space Coast Credit Union members well, since they know that our members now have the ability to share their experience with other members. This is a tremendously powerful ability in helping us fulfill our mission to, “Create value in cooperative ownership.”
In order to fully accomplish these goals, we will expand the information available on our web site to include checklists to assist members in identifying and following the steps necessary to accomplish a wide variety of life events, such as buying a first home or getting teens started on managing credit and building a strong credit history.
Central to our desire to have the collective voice of our credit union members heard, we will also continue to encourage members to provide their feedback through our Watchdog Rating Program. We will continue to survey members who have used a product or service, share ratings and comments (both good and bad), and provide you, our members, with information as to how we are addressing the areas you identify as needing improvement.
Doug Samuels
President/CEO
SCCU Member since 1991
Learn more about the Watchdog rating system.
