The Secret's Out

Half of lenders have “secret-shopped” themselves, according to a survey STRATMOR conducted, while 70% said they secret-shopped their competitors.

“There was a higher propensity to look outward and see what competitors were doing versus inward to see, ‘What are we doing?’ ” McCracken says. “I think it’s always a good idea for employees to secret-shop and understand what it’s like to be a consumer, but I also think it’s really important to get a separate set of eyes outside the organization — a dispassionate third party who has perspective about what competitors do. When you do this as often as we do, you create benchmarks.”

For example, filling out a contact form on a lender’s website initiates a series of follow-ups from the company. The timeliness of responses can make all the difference.

Of the companies STRATMOR’s secret shoppers reached out to, the average response time was 11 hours and 14 minutes. The fastest was nearly instantaneous and the longest was three days later, after being nudged.

Be Human

STRATMOR recently secret-shopped about 30 top companies, posing as a desirable borrower.

“Of those 30, not a single person asked me why I was buying a home,” McCracken says. “It didn’t feel like there was a human connection.”

One of his favorite sayings comes from STRATMOR Senior Partner Garth Graham, and that’s “be human.”

“If you can engage consumers on that level and supply a technically proficient and consumer-centric process, you’ve probably built the raving fan that’s going to stick with you because you’ve made them feel validated, you’ve made them feel good, and you’ve made them feel comfortable,” Graham says.

The decision to buy a home is usually rooted in another meaningful life event, such as getting married, divorced, having a child, or getting a new job. Finding out what the catalyst is can bridge the connection between lender and borrower.

“There’s this opportunity to really get personal with someone really quickly,” McCracken says. “Some of the best advisors I’ve ever seen remind me of really good pediatricians. They’ve been doing it for many years, and they’re getting all the questions answered they need to fill out that 1003, but they’re not asking in a regimented way. It’s conversational.”

Experience management

Experience management platforms put data and statistics to work to analyze companies’ CX systems, identifying gaps and areas to improve.

“We are all about collecting, analyzing and activating Voice of Customer to power the professional business online,” Experience.com CEO Scott Harris told NMP. “We’re not secret shoppers; we are proactive campaign folks.”

Experience.com collects customer feedback on behalf of loan officers and lending companies so they can discern who their top performers are and who needs work, but also to automate distribution of that feedback.

“We partner with all of the other platforms — Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Zillow, Lending Tree — to share that great customer feedback everywhere so they can win online,” Harris explains. “I can give you a benchmark of nearly every loan officer in the U.S. and tell you where they stand in their local market.”

More than 400,000 LOs have profiles linked to the site.

“If you Google search anybody on the platform and they’re using the platform appropriately, they should be on the first page of search, and if you’re looking for a mortgage in a market that we have a customer in, our customers usually come up on top,” Harris says. “When you come into the platform as a user, you’ll notice that not only do we help you get to the top, we literally run an algorithm to show you why you’re not at the top, who’s ahead of you, and exactly what you have to do to jump them on search. As you play the game, your score goes up, and you can watch and recalculate where you stand online.”

A mechanized motion

Experience.com uses complex algorithms and data to provide CX monitoring and analysis.

“Our motion is a scaled motion and it’s mechanized, not one-to-one labor intensive,” Harris says. “It’s not secret shopping; it’s API secret shopping. It’s literally monitoring activity both transactionally — from the way we touch base with customers — and programmatically, from the way we monitor what’s being said.”

One of the products the platform offers monitors employee activity and ensures compliance.

“If somebody says ‘interest rates’ in a post we catch it and make sure it has an NMLS ID so we know the post is legal,” Harris says. “It’s very important to us to make sure our customers aren’t tripping over truth in advertising or truth-in-lending rules.”

In one recent case, a top performing loan officer was caught posting hate speech on social media. The system flagged this individual, and the lending company handled it appropriately.

Empathy for the consumer

Creating a “Wow!” experience takes human power, according to STRATMOR.

Up to half the cost of originating a mortgage can be spent on sales and marketing to get borrowers to sign on.

“So you’re spending an awful lot of money to get that first loan, and statistics say that 80% of consumers choose not to get their next loan with the company they used before,” Graham says. “At some point if you don’t focus on that level of experience, you find out that every single year you have to buy customers at $4 to $5,000 a piece just to replace the ones that should be coming back to you for less. They’re not returning because it’s not a wow experience.”

In its surveying of more than a million customers the last few years, STRATMOR found that 20% of the time people report being asked for the same info multiple times.

“That is roughly a 50-point drop in net promoter score (NPS) or likelihood to recommend,” Graham says. “A 50-point drop in NPS means they’re not coming back. They’re a detractor at that point. In fact, they’ll tell their friends not to go there, too.”

When and how much

STRATMOR’s McCracken recommends lenders secret-shop at least monthly, multiple times, and via different avenues.

“Look at data points,” he says. “Benchmark contact application rate, from pulled credit to locking of a loan, pull through rate, cost per contact, cost per loan, expense and analytics. What do you expect in your organization in terms of consumer experience, and how is that franchised across your organization?”

Check up on different loan advisors in various regions across the country, walk in to retail locations and at least once a year, McCracken says, do a comprehensive review of the company’s production environment.

When STRATMOR conducts one of these, staff meet with all of the players in a team and go through their loan application process with them step by step, changing the variables.

“Really, it’s the first time that all the employees in the room have seen the end-to-end experience since they employed all the technology,” McCracken says.

However it’s performed, a self-analysis of CX can be the driving force to a lender’s ultimate success.