When the winter weather took a turn for the worse in early February, Xtend, Inc., a Grand Rapids, Michigan-based multi-owned cooperative CUSO, once again sprung into action. In advance of the well-publicized storms, Xtend’s credit union partners from New York to Texas and just about every Midwest state began lighting up the phone lines to request assistance with their back office and member-facing services when and if the credit unions were forced to close.
Xtend President Scott Collins noted, “Although early-February blizzards are nothing new to the Midwest and East Coast, this weather event impacted nearly every geographic area in our cuasterisk.com network. About the only exceptions were the West Coast states and Florida. Since many of our partners are in the Great Lakes states and out east, we knew that we were in for a busy couple of days.” Diane Kilgore, the CUSO’s SRS Bookkeeping Manager, said, “The most popular request was for our back-office team to work their draft, ACH and ATM exceptions if they had to close their doors for a day or two, but we also had several that were prepared to re-direct member service calls to our Xtension Call Center. Overall, we provided back-office support for a total of fifteen partners, and several of them had to stay closed for multiple days. And my friends over on the call center side handled calls for several credit unions that were closed.”
Collins also noted, “The stand-in support was made even more challenging by the fact that our offices were in the crosshairs of a potential blizzard as well. We ended up getting more than a foot of snow, but our team barely missed a beat because of the contingency processes we had developed. I am very proud of the way that my team stepped up to the plate for our credit unions once again, although I am quite sure everyone is looking forward to a little spring weather.”
According to Collins, this event marked the third time in as many months that his teams have provided stand-in services for credit unions affected by severe weather.