As the pandemic continues to affect the economy, financial institutions feel more pressure to have a borrower-first approach and meet these essential financial needs and goals. Also, there has been a steady stream of home-buying and refinancing activity.
These changes require loan officers to reevaluate what a borrow-first approach looks like.
Keep reading for ways to connect with clients and serve them well during this critical time as their trusted advisor. Begin building the foundation for lifelong borrower relationships.
1. Practice Efficiency
Borrower expectations about the time needed to complete traditionally time-consuming processes change dramatically. These tasks include opening bank accounts or applying for credit. Combined with specific market pressures occurring during the pandemic, borrowers often give their business to lenders who have a speedier mortgage process.
However, this borrower-first mindset is often difficult. Often, the ability to move quickly decreases as the number of people needed to manufacture, approve, and disburse a loan increases. Focus on creating a streamlined process that cuts down time to close. Commit to smooth transitions between the many parties involved.
2. Automate Processes
On top of a need for increased speed, there is also a borrower-first demand related to the pandemic. To move customers through the pipeline faster, organizations have scrambled to automate administrative processes. Instead of shuffling through piles of paperwork, automate what you can. What requires the human touch in your work day?
Types of Automations
Without marketing mortgage automations, you spend your whole day sending out marketing materials. Automating your marketing saves you time for more important tasks.
Jungo provides you with many automations that keep you from feeling overwhelmed. Want to gain more referrals, close more leads, and grow your business with mortgage automations? Use them in your daily routine with just a click.
Loan Milestone Updates
These are useful for updating all interested parties on the status of their loan. They customize to send to the borrower, co-borrower, and transaction partners on the loan. Options for delivery include emails, text messages, or both.
Drip Marketing Campaigns
These are time-dependent marketing mortgage automations that slowly drip market to your leads or clients on a regular basis. They are perfect for keeping your clients focused on the goal of closing their loan or refinancing with you. They can also change automatically based on your client’s stage with you: lead, in process, or closed.
Drip marketing is not exclusive to clients! There are also campaigns for realtors and CPAs to promote client referrals and good partnerships. It is important to have constant marketing going out so that you are keeping your business in the forefront of your clients’ and partners’ minds.
Knowing what to automate is essential to a smooth customer experience and engaging employees.
3. Make the Process Easy-to-Follow
Most lending designs around the needs of lenders, not what is ideal for customers. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes to fully understand the strengths and weaknesses in your processes. What would it be like to actually go through your processes step-by-step?
At the end of the day, it is frustrating to customers when their lenders do not leverage existing tools and technology to complete time-consuming tasks for getting a loan. One of the main irritations for people is having to provide the same information over and over. So, begin building foundation between teams and use data to provide an easy-to-follow experience for your customers.
4. Focus on the Borrower-First Approach
Due to the pandemic, many customers focus on financial survival as well as getting things done as quickly as possible. So, once people have more time and financial resources to make informed decisions, customer service is what matters most. In order to stay competitive in the industry, combining steps in the home-buying process benefits all parties. Customers prefer a “one-stop shop” approach.
This approach includes a seamless digital transaction that happens in portals. So, the desire to take advantage of digital mobility is here to stay, so video-based closing is worth committing to this year.
Bottom Line
It is important to think about what your version of the all-inclusive digital lending experience looks like. So, push your processes toward it and focus on the borrower-first mindset. Also, don’t look at customers as a simple transaction. Rather, advise and help guide them through one of the most important financial decisions of their lives.
