Every person searching for a lender wants to know that the provider offers top quality in terms of communication and service. Without these critical pieces, customers are encouraged to go elsewhere and avoid recommending the lending service to friends. In order to achieve the best possible relationship with potential customers, lenders must be willing to meet or exceed expectations. According to lending professional Tom Knapp, engagement with borrowers happens once every 7-10 years- that gives you a small window of time to make a really great impression.
This article includes some of the best tips on how to create positive and long-lasting relationships with your lending and servicing customers. Follow these tips to serve not only your existing customers, but to set a strong foundation for attracting future customers and referrals. A successful strategy will use both personalized customer service and technology working together to achieve goals.
Find Your Loopholes
Even companies that pride themselves on good feedback related to customer service could have some lessons to learn. This requires obtaining comprehensive feedback from customers and focusing specifically on areas for improvement. As Bill Gates says, “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
While some feedback is surely shared in the heat of the moment after a frustrating experience, even those interactions could have nuggets of information that allow you to tweak an existing process. What you learn from this exercise can point you in the right direction in terms of working with specific team members, but it can also open your eyes to how leveraged technology can serve your company across the board. Making the process easier for the borrower and comforting him or her about your company’s ability to respond quickly and effectively to issues is crucial for high quality.
Analyze Where You’re At
If you’re not already taking stock in the form of quality analytics, you need to. Your first metric for capture should be how long each stage of the lending process is taking. Take stock of:
- Submission
- Processing
- Underwriting
- Closing
- Funding
Is each step of this process taking between 48-72 hours? If there’s a portion of this process that is taking longer, figure out why. Set up conversations with the employees in that department and find out if there’s a common reason for delays. Small steps could be taken to reduce those challenges and keep the timeline on track.
Know Your Current and Future Customers
According to Realtor, millennials are going to be playing a huge role in household and mortgage creation over the next decade. The impacts of this shift are already taking place- in 2014 alone, more than 1/3 of all loans were closed by millennials.
If you don’t already have solutions in place that are geared to serve this particular generation, it’s time to put the wheels in motion for this to happen. This means meeting your customers where they are at. With so many millennials using their mobile phones, you want to be sure you’ve considered this comfort with completing transactions on mobile. Using mobile technology on your own in terms of submitting documents is one way that you can make the processing and service better.
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