‘Zoom Really Proved Itself’: Happy State Bank Gains Much-Needed Reliability, Visibility During COVID-19

Established in 1908, Happy State Bank has played an important role in the financial well-being of Texans for over a century. Happy State Bank has 43 locations in 32 communities, serving its customers throughout the Texas Panhandle, South Plains, and Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex area. The organization provides a host of financial services, including home loans, personal loans, and investment and trust services, empowering its personal and business banking customers to take control of their finances.

With numerous awards for both customer service and its company culture, Happy State Bank is dedicated to serving its clients and contributing to the communities it serves.

Significant issues with a legacy solution

With so many branches across such a large service area, Happy State Bank relies on video communication to stay in contact with its branches, communicate with external stockholders, and ensure a consistent experience across its branches. However, the organization’s legacy solution struggled to support reliable, high-quality video or audio, and its lack of features made it difficult to diagnose the issues its users were facing.

“We were having significant issues with Webex,” said Jeff Rademaekers, Happy State Bank’s Senior Vice President of IT. “We couldn’t effectively use telepresence or make conference calls because we were experiencing outages and constant change. There’s also no visibility into how the back end of Webex works, so we couldn’t understand how users were being affected. There was no way to diagnose what issues we were experiencing and therefore, no way to fix them.”

The teams at Happy State Bank recognized the need for a more reliable video solution and also the need for an intuitive solution that employees could easily adapt to.

“Our employees were only making phone calls with Webex, so they had never done a video meeting or anything like that,” Rademaekers said. “We needed to make sure that whatever solution we went with, people would be able to figure it out and use a brand-new technology without any issues.”

Happy State Bank moved its employees to a work-from-home environment at the start of COVID-19 as the organization was in the final stages of choosing its video solution, accelerating the need for the right solution that could be managed and implemented remotely.

‘The reliability was there’

To ensure that Happy State Bank’s employees could work effectively from home, the organization decided to let them try Zoom for themselves.

“Zoom really proved itself,” Rademaekers said. “Our executive leadership really liked the way that Zoom worked, and so did our employees. So we decided to use it for our stockholders meeting, and it proved that the platform had all of the capabilities that we needed. The reliability was there, but we also really liked the ease of use and the features as well. We also learned through the proof-of-concept that we could use the Zoom Dashboard to diagnose any issues we came across.”

Happy State Bank’s IT team was able to easily adopt the solution and seamlessly educate employees on how to leverage the solution remotely, even for high-profile meetings and events.

“At the beginning we hosted some high-visibility events over Zoom, like our board meetings and our stockholders meeting, and we were able to provide some close support to our employees to make sure things went off without a hitch,” said Justin Wesbrooks, Vice President of IT at Happy State Bank. “We developed some guides around everyday usage for our employees, and I think as a whole everyone learned to use Zoom pretty quickly. Within a few weeks we were able to move to Zoom completely.”

The organization also used Zoom Webinars to provide presentations to potential investors and drive capital investment.

Simplifying communications where the bank needed it most

By implementing Zoom, Happy State Bank transitioned to a reliable, intuitive, and dynamic solution that simplified communications when the bank needed them most.

As Happy State Bank continues to serve its customers during the pandemic, Zoom will play an important role in supporting the organization’s communication and its tight-knit culture.

“At Happy State Bank, our culture relies on close connections and those face-to-face conversations,” Rademaekers said. “With Zoom Meetings, we can get that face-to-face contact, and so it has really helped us in supporting us and our culture. Instead of getting on a phone call, I can go talk to someone directly and see their body language.”