For years, LBS Financial Credit Union’s network was ineffective and would regularly go down for extended periods, resulting in a frequent loss of productivity for employees and a potential hit to the institution’s reputation. The LBS Financial team knew it needed a more reliable telecom and security solution. Otherwise, it risked providing a poor customer experience.

LBS Financial Credit Union is a member-owned cooperative serving more than 140,000 members and eight branch office locations. It began as the Long Beach School Employees Federal Credit Union in 1935, and now has an asset size of about $2.0 billion and more than 140,000 members.

Senior Vice President of Information Systems for LBS Financial Credit Union, Kevin Reed, oversees a team of 13 people located in its Westminster, California, office. In addition to overseeing the typical IT responsibilities, he’s also responsible for the institution’s information security program.

Solution: Evolve Technology Offerings Without Sacrificing the Customer Experience

In 2015, the credit union was working with a national telecom provider, and the LBS Financial team felt they were not given the attention or support they deserved from their provider.

Worst of all, the network would continually go down, and the team never knew how long the outage would last. “There was no way to predict when it would go down,” Reed recalled. The result was a poor experience for credit union members.

LBS Financial Credit Union began working with a telecommunications broker who recommended the credit union consider TPx. Reed conducted his due diligence, checking with other financial institutions that worked with TPx and found the perfect partner.

Results: The Difference was ‘Night and Day.’

Working with TPx, LBS Financial Credit Union upgraded to Managed SD-WAN. The connection was stable, and the secure, reliable connection made it possible for employees to do their jobs without disruptive downtimes allowing them to provide excellent customer service to their members.

“Our employees were very happy once we made the switch to SD-WAN and everything stabilized because they were the ones who had to deal with the upset members,” Reed said.

“For telecom, what we need is stability, making sure that our circuits are up for both data and voice,” Reed added. “We have a call center that handles an enormous amount of calls every day, so having stable circuits for that is really important too.”

TPx’s Managed SD-WAN solution prioritizes traffic for LBS Financial Credit Union’s business priorities to achieve a stable and optimized connection. With better network performance, the credit union benefitted from increased application performance and improved user experience, allowing them to provide better service to their members.

A Long-Term Partner

With TPx, the LBS Financial team has a partner they can turn to as needed with any issues that arise. And the TPx team is continually working with the credit union to keep them apprised of the latest technology in the marketplace.

“Customer service is really important to us because we’re a customer service business,” Reed said. “Any financial institution offers pretty much the same services as every other financial institution, so quality and dependable customer service is one of our main differentiators. I felt that TPx really bent over backwards to get our business.”

“As new technologies become available, TPx is making those available to us whether or not we’re using them right now so there’s always an opportunity to make improvements to our network and services,” Reed said. “It’s nice to know we have a partner we can count on as our needs change over the years.”

To learn more about how TPx helped upgrade LBS Financial Credit Union’s services, read the full case study.