Usherpa Blog - How Modern Borrowers Want to Communicate
In my last post, I wrote about how the loan status updates that have been built into modern loan origination systems (LOSs) to keep borrowers up to date on the progress of their loan are inadequate to meet the needs of today’s borrowers and the real estate agents that serve them.
Lenders need a Smart CRM to send more in-process marketing messages, tailored to the specific preferences of the borrower and their business referral partners. Fortunately, such technology exists today.
How We Communicate with our Borrowers Matters
Consumers have embraced technology but they don’t all use the same tools to communicate. While some borrowers prefer email, others are more accessible by text message. Some will go online to the lender’s borrower-facing portal, while others will only respond to a phone call. Learning your borrower’s communication preferences has become an important part of the mortgage loan sales process.
But just because the borrower will see your communications because it comes to them through their preferred channel doesn’t mean they will fully comprehend it and be moved to take action.
Often, the borrower must see or hear the lender’s request to fully understand what is required to move the deal forward. One of the most effective communication tools available to lenders today is video.
Smart CRM systems now make it possible for loan officers to create custom, fully compliant video messages easily. This is effective because the recipient of the message both sees and hears the person they are learning to trust. On-screen prompts help them understand exactly what is required next.
Because no lender can afford the risk of non-compliance, every video message the LO sends out must be checked for compliance by management before it is delivered. Smart CRMs make this easy.
Text messages are another very effective communication tool. While current data suggests that most LOs will use text to communicate with a borrower, few lenders have enterprise compliance oversight of loan officer text-based communication. This increases their risk.
A Smart CRM builds compliance checks into these messages, as well. Like video messages, these can be created in advance and then automatically sent to borrowers when they hit certain milestones in the loan origination process.
In the case of video, text and every other form of lender communication with the borrower, management must have the ability to turn off automated messaging when appropriate, overriding the loan officer’s ability to send messages.
Empowering LOs with Marketing Automation
To make the best use of these tools, good marketing automation should be employed that will allow the lender to customize its marketing messages, both in terms of the content they can deliver and when they are delivered in the process.
This requires sophisticated marketing automation that is simply not available in even the most advanced loan origination systems today. Not even the new Point of Sale technologies can do this without an integration to a specialized industry CRM.
But this technology is available and we would love the opportunity to show it to you. Usherpa’s Smart CRM does everything I’ve been writing about in this series and we can demonstrate that to you in an online meeting at your convenience.
To find out more about the benefits a Smart CRM can bring to your business, contact Usherpa today.
