STCU extends culture of service to employees

STCU has developed a great reputation among its members for almost 100 years. Recently, the credit union founded by Spokane schoolteachers in 1934 built on that success by acquiring other regional banks and credit unions. But onboarding employees and systems came with complexity that threatened to overburden the IT team and ultimately impact member service. 

STCU’s existing on-premises service desk system lacked the automation, integration, and centralized communications needed to manage the increasing volume of tickets from employees. To keep up with demand, the IT team decided to replace its disconnected systems with a single platform featuring both IT service management (ITSM) and IT operations management (ITOM) capabilities.

Freshservice stood out for its ability to automate incident and asset management efforts, improve visibility during critical incidents, and shorten response times. Transforming the employee experience with more responsive support and improving system reliability means employees focus less on issues and more on delivering the outstanding service that members expect. In addition to the full range of Freshservice modules, STCU is adopting AI capabilities to improve employee self-service and help teams better communicate with members.

The company

STCU is a not-for-profit, member-owned credit union helping members serve the community since 1934. With close to 300,000 members, the credit union operates 39 branches in eastern Washington and northern Idaho.

The challenge

Customer service lies at the heart of all STCU decisions, including what systems will help employees work most efficiently. The IT department, led by Greg Gallaway, vice president and director of Information Technology, is always looking for ways to improve productivity and deliver the best service for employees.

As STCU grew through mergers and acquisitions, IT needed to onboard new staff and systems quickly without impacting member service. However, its disparate solutions for IT ticketing, alerts, and monitoring limited visibility across issues, leading to missed issues and employees receiving inconsistent responses. 

Gallaway wanted a true ITSM and ITOM system to drive IT efficiency, integrate with other systems, and support departments across STCU. Freshservice checked these boxes, offering a deep service catalog with automated issue routing, the ability to schedule workflows and connect systems using APIs, and continuous updates and AI features to support the credit union’s growth with intelligence and efficiency.

The solution

With Freshservice, employees can report persistent issues by simply clicking a desktop icon. Agents receive an alert in Freshservice with all system information, so they can quickly and easily identify and address the root cause of an issue. 

Gallaway and team leverage built-in automations that link workflows across teams to properly escalate and manage incidents. For example, employees can submit a phishing incident directly to a third-party vendor using Freshservice, rather than going through the cybersecurity team. Once resolved, Freshservice automatically closes the ticket and alerts those involved.

Teams outside of IT also use Freshservice to streamline workflows. After struggling to manage invoices through email, the accounting and finance team adopted a workflow that automatically routes each invoice to the right approvers, making everyone more productive.

Impact 

According to Gallaway, communication is key to improving employee satisfaction. With Freshservice, teams can add detailed status descriptions to tickets, keeping everyone in sync. That efficiency, combined with increased workflow automation, helped STCU achieve an average resolution time of 17.44 hours, more than four hours less than the industry standard.

“Our team now communicates more concrete updates to employees, so they feel heard and appreciated, which helped us achieve our 100% satisfaction rate,” says Gallaway.

The single platform helps teams share resources more efficiently, boosting the IT team’s first contact resolution rate to 82.8%—6.7% above the industry standard. Planned migration from PagerDuty to Freshservice will also save the credit union tens of thousands of dollars every year.

Gallaway is eagerly testing new features. Freddy AI Copilot helps agents write more standard, informative responses to incidents in less time, and agents are testing Freddy AI Agent to query SharePoint to find answers to common issues.

“We like to push the boundaries and constantly take advantage of the next best thing,” says Gallaway. “With Freshservice, we’re enhancing our ability to improve employee service from every angle.”