When the CU*Answers Management Services (CMS) leadership team was looking to drive attendance for two of its strategic risk management web conferences, it had to look no further than across the hall for a partner’s assistance.  The Xtension Call Center – a business unit of Grand Rapids, Michigan-based cooperative CUSO Xtend, Inc. – was engaged early on in the process to provide event reminder and confirmation calls – and the resulting attendance was the highest CMS had seen since early last year.

“Typically we shoot for at least one-third or our CU*BASE (the CU*Answers, Inc. core data processing suite) credit unions for our web conferences,” said Jim Vilker, a Vice President on the CMS team, “but when we host significant risk mitigation and management sessions, we hope to get a bigger audience.  We had engaged our partners at Xtend before, so we were confident that we could count on great attendance.  We hosted two sessions over the past month that focused on risk concentration, both of which we felt were a must for our credit union partners based upon the changing regulatory environment.  The Xtension team was turned loose as each date approached, and we had more than 70 credit unions attend each one.”

According to Xtend President Scott Collins, the outbound call projects supporting CU*Answers have kept Xtension busy over the past two years.  “Over the past year-and-a-half our agents have executed nearly fifty call campaigns for our partners at CU*Answers,” he noted.  “We have worked hard during that time to earn their trust and confidence, so results like we achieved with these two recent projects for Jim (Vilker) help validate our team’s hard work.  Good results mean additional opportunities, so it is truly a win-win.”

Xtend currently provides outbound services for six CUSOs on an ongoing basis.