VyStar Credit Union invests in scalable design system powered by Contentful

Introduction

Founded in 1952 to serve military and civil service employees and their families, VyStar has offered its members a growing range of banking, borrowing, investment, and insurance services. Fast forward to today, VyStar is open to anyone who lives or works in the 78 counties in Florida and Georgia it serves. 

But, before the credit union could continue expanding in the market, it needed to expand its tech stack to include tools capable of helping the company redesign its digital experience. In doing so, VyStar would also address one of the key business challenges credit unions face today: Keeping up with the digital trends and services offered by larger credit unions and traditional, commercial banks.

By swapping out code-heavy technologies for a user-friendly composable content platform like Contentful, the company was able to develop a new reusable design system and streamline its content management processes.

Transferring to a new piece of technology

Discussion of adopting a new content platform began in 2020 when the pain points concerning website design began to stack up. Because VyStar’s main marketing website was largely hardcoded, teams across the company relied on developers to update or add new design elements. Before an addition or update could even be made, they had to submit a support ticket and wait an indeterminate amount of time for that ticket to be addressed. 

The result was workflows that forced one team to wait on the work of another before it could carry out its portion of the project. This stalled production times for VyStar’s entire digital team. Furthermore, the company’s collection of disconnected content management tools — which grew with each expansion — led to content silos.

“The biggest impact in my opinion was with multi-site creation. Anytime we had this event before, we had to reach out to developers to spin up a new site,“ Stephanie Holbrook, Senior Digital Product Manager at VyStar Credit Union, shared.

According to Holbrook and others, the company was looking to scale without so much reliance on its small development team to support marketing-led initiatives. Eager to bring its digital properties and content together while empowering more people across the organization to have a hand in building and managing content, the company began to explore more user-friendly content management tools.

Putting a deposit down on design systems and expert support

While the Product team was the primary decider in selecting the new technology, they consulted their design,  IT, and marketing teams along the way. Vice President of UX Design and Digital Analytics Jonny Leweke was instrumental as the re-platform was set to coincide with a web redesign.

“I had a vision that my team would build new, more intuitive, accessible, and dynamic experiences that could scale with member needs, organizational goals, and industry trends,” Leweke said. This vision eventually materialized when VyStar adopted Contentful and implemented it in connection with a new digital design system.

VyStar’s digital teams first spent several months with the new tool developing that design system with help from Contentful Professional Services. This work resulted in 18 templates and 60+ design components that could be mixed and matched to ensure brand consistency amid scaling digital content. Examples include comparison tables, videos, blogs, and press releases.

“Contentful Professional Services consistently engaged in collaborative efforts with us, ensuring a successful and punctual launch of our first website... Since then, our team has successfully deployed three additional websites, and we remain consistently impressed with the continuous evolution of [its] features and functionalities,” Holbrook said. 

Balancing creative freedom with consistency

Just eight months after adopting the platform, VyStar launched its redesigned site. The team was pleasantly surprised to see that the modern, cohesive design correlated with a 40%-200% improvement in conversion rates.

The positive results of this adoption were also experienced internally. With an editor-friendly interface and the ability to create and publish content free of developer involvement, VyStar’s Marketing and Deposit Operations teams have regained ownership of content operations. 

“It went from one technical person maintaining our websites to now several people from marketing being able to do so,” Holbrook noted, hinting at the team’s newfound ability to produce more content in shorter amounts of time than possible with their previous tools. 

The credit union is mitigating the concerns that ordinarily crop up when democratizing content creations — inconsistencies in quality and fumbled handoffs, for example — with the Contentful Workflow app. VyStar has leveraged the tool to ensure content doesn’t go live without completing a thorough review process. They’ve even set up a preview environment for instant visibility of draft content in a production-like setting, facilitating quality assurance and accessibility testing. 

According to Holbrook, Workflows was an invaluable tool during the company’s recent National Credit Union Administration audit. “We provided documentation for our workflows that aligned with the administration’s 'maker/checker' requirements,” she said.

Making an investment in personalization

With its first website redesign complete and three new websites built, VyStar plans to continue maximizing its personalization efforts. 

According to Holbrook, the credit union has invested in Uniform (one of the many apps available in the Contentful Marketplace) and begun experimenting with activity-based personalization for members to increase retention. Early success included a 300% increase in opened applications in the first month. As the company continues to expand throughout other counties of Florida and Georgia, it will implement geo-localized personalization to attract prospects with exclusive offerings and content. 

“It’s amazing how you can make Contentful work for almost any use case or project. I’m excited for all the other things we’ll configure in the future,” Leweke said.