STRATMOR Group has released a new white paper focused on customer satisfaction in the mortgage lending industry with methods to measure and improve it. Federal regulators are pressing lenders to respond to customer satisfaction problems but few are proactive in the way they measure this important metric—or in the way they respond to problems.
“A year after rolling out our MortgageSAT offering, we now have enough data on the state of customer satisfaction to draw some conclusions,” said Garth Graham, head of STRATMOR Group’s marketing strategy and execution practice. “Lenders are missing out on a great deal of opportunity to reach out to those borrowers who are so dissatisfied that they are willing to go on to a government website to complain about it.”
MortgageSAT provides lenders with detailed information about customer satisfaction that provides actionable insight into drivers of borrower behavior, and useful peer data for benchmarking and improvement programs. Through MortgageSAT, STRATMOR found that up to 10% of the borrowers in any given lender’s pipeline will be dissatisfied after the closing and are willing to talk about it. When the lender has a method of identifying these borrowers and reaching out to them, the relationship can be salvaged and the lender benefits in numerous ways. When these borrowers are ignored, they can post negative comments on social media, damage relationships with referral sources, and even complain to the CFPB.
In this white paper, STRATMOR outlines the benefits that lenders will enjoy if they can increase their customer satisfaction levels above and beyond minimizing compliance risk. It also discusses various methods of customer satisfaction measurement and analyzes the impacts of failing to meet regulator and consumer expectations in this area.
“The bottom line is that this is a new way of doing business in the mortgage industry,” Graham said. “The old ways of determining whether a consumer was satisfied with a lender’s service, if a lender even used those methods, are no longer sufficient to mitigate risk. But focusing only on risk mitigation blinds the lender to the many great opportunities available to them when they focus on a positive customer experience as a goal of the mortgage lending process. It’s not just something you need to do, it’s something that companies should want to do to ensure more referrals and repeat customers in the future.”
