Usherpa Blog - Meeting Borrower Expectations with Better Communication
What do they expect? Not to be surprised, for one thing.
That’s a tall order, given that most consumers know little, if anything, about the loan origination process. When you consider all the loan origination expenses that are passed back to the consumer and the third parties that contribute their data back to the process, keeping borrowers informed and up to date becomes a very difficult task.
But it’s critically important.
How technology can harm a relationship
Lenders know this, of course. As early as the mid-90s, technology developers were working on ways to help loan originators get information out of their LOSs in order to send out regular status updates to borrowers.
Lenders who provide more (and more accurate) information to borrowers during the loan origination process achieve higher levels of borrower satisfaction, which leads directly to more repeat and referral business.
And yet, according to J.D. Power & Associates, as recently as last November, when the company released the results of its 2020 U.S. Primary Mortgage Origination customer satisfaction survey, many lenders still were not meeting their borrower’s expectations. In fact, the COVID-driven shift to digital worked against many, lowering customer satisfaction by an average of five points.
In the rush to go digital, lenders were falling short on person-to-person communication and customer satisfaction scores were falling when the lender’s self-service functionality failed to give borrowers all the information they wanted.
Borrowers don’t want to talk to computers. They want to talk to people they can trust.
How technology can build stronger relationships
The key to high levels of satisfaction is increased human communication. Technology has made it possible to deliver exactly what borrowers want, but it requires lenders to think differently about these important borrower messages.
The right Customer Relationship Management technology for marketing automation doesn’t replace the loan officer in the relationship with the borrower, it empowers the LO to build more meaningful relationships with their borrowers.
In the next few blog posts, I’ll explain how.
