American 1 Credit Union

Achievements

Woman in banker's office signing financial loan for project

The Challenge

American 1 Credit Union (A1CU) takes pride in providing exceptional customer service and personal banking solutions to over 60,000 members. With a growing employee and customer base, A1CU currently has 16 branch locations across six counties in Michigan.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, A1CU turned to video to connect its more than 200 employees, 65% of which are front-line retail banking staff. While they knew video was the most efficient, effective, and engaging way to communicate with their workforce, the company faced internal storage limitations, restrictions to access and sharing, and security concerns around managing thousands of hours of video.

Young employees explain ideas during working meeting

The Solution

A1CU adopted Panopto to deliver secure, consistent internal communications across the organization, providing every employee with their own account to access important messages such as quarterly All Staff Meeting videos, quick weekly updates through their Monday Morning News videos, and project updates. 

“Panopto has become our standard way of communicating with staff,” says Jayme Bicknell, Marketing Manager at A1CU. “How we include video is part of every conversation around internal announcements and much of our training and onboarding.” 

The company also uses Panopto to provide engaging, standardized internal video training for both front-line and corporate staff – from onboarding and core values courses to technical and customer service training.

“Previously, all training was in-person, time-consuming, and somewhat inefficient. We would have to pull front-line team members out of the branch, find someone to cover for them while they were out, and take them on-site to our Resource Center for training,” says Bicknell. “Now, we have a hybrid model. We pre-record the training that we know we will consistently need, and provide it on-demand. We also have trainers record their live sessions so people who aren’t in attendance can revisit them later.”

“Panopto is an efficient and useful tool because we can reach anyone, anywhere with the same information. It’s really helped us expedite training and save hundreds of hours.”

Jayme Bicknell, Marketing Manager
Employees with female African American leader working together

The Impact

“Making video a key part of our communications has been really helpful to the team,” Bicknell says. “Culturally, it’s really important to us that employees feel heard and informed so that they can best serve our membership and our community. As an easy tool that helps us get in front of our team and share key information, Panopto is just perfect for us. We really appreciate the consistency it provides.”

Not only does A1CU connect its growing team with consistent video communications and training, it’s fostering a culture of video that’s improving organizational engagement and alignment.

“We use Panopto’s video analytics to monitor how teams and individuals are engaging with our communications and create weekly branch and team engagement reports for managers and the executive team,” says Jeff King, Multimedia Specialist at A1CU. “Since adopting Panopto, staff are more engaged and they’re getting information faster and in a format that they can better process. We have different learning styles on the team, and moving toward a culture of video makes it easier for everyone to learn.”

“Using Panopto makes my job so much easier,” adds King. “As a content creator, having one intuitive platform to instantly share messages with the entire company, access analytics, and manage all video storage has been great. It’s just easy. I honestly don’t know what we’d do without it.”

Download the PDF case study.