Communication is an important part of the mortgage application and indeed the lender-intermediary partnership. You want to know what stage a case is at because your clients want to know, and you have that duty to inform them so they can see progression, have confidence in the process, and be reassured they are on track to complete within their desired timescale.
As a lender, communicating with advisers in an efficient way is absolutely vital; it has to be all about how we keep you informed quickly and efficiently, so that you don’t waste time, energy and money chasing us for updates, and, equally, how we can gather the information required to get a case to offer quickly.
Changes in technology and advisers’ preferences for how to be reached have evolved considerably in the last two years, and lenders must constantly evolve their practices to achieve optimum information exchange on the channels which suit their intermediary audience best.
To be able to do that, we have to understand where the pressure points are within your process. What part of it generates the most information requests from advisers? When do advisers and clients want – and need – an update? How best can we provide that?
We undertook some research recently on this issue which has resulted in a number of communication changes. For instance, our analysis showed that a fifth of all the case update calls made by us were about the valuation status. Understandably, given the key role the valuation plays, advisers want to know when it has been instructed, when it has been booked, and of course when it has been returned.
Simplistically, that could mean three specific calls being made to advisers, when we believe our operators’ time could be better served, for example, chasing the final documents required on pre-offer cases.
So, we believe it is far better for our underwriting portal to trigger email notifications automatically when one of those three valuation ‘events’ happen. Those notifications to the adviser are now immediate and automated as the task is completed by the underwriter and should hopefully ensure advisers don’t have to chase us on these matters, and we don’t have to make the calls required to update.
And it won’t just stop there. Those three events are the first prioritised few of 17 identified case status updates that we’ll be implementing in the coming months, which again should ensure advisers don’t have to spend time on the phone, or online, chasing Foundation for the updates.
We don’t underestimate the stress and frustration this can cause, or indeed the cost. I was reading recently of firms who are employing people just to sit on the phone – on hold – to their lenders every hour of every working day. That can’t be right and it surely doesn’t provide the working efficiencies advisory firms want and need to have. That individual’s time could be better spent elsewhere on all manner of jobs, so our focus is on ensuring we are not a lender which requires this sort of employment.
With the addition of these automated emails, mortgage advisers can access their case status from a range of channels: via the online portal, by phone, in person of course if you have met up with one of our Regional Account Managers, and now via pushed email messaging.
Of course, these tools are only as powerful as you make them, so we are relying on our partners to take advantage of this rich data stream. Are Foundation emails set as a ‘safe’ sender to appear in your inbox? Might you need to forward these emails to an administrator to update your own systems and save someone else a call?
What we are actually doing is implementing a series of relatively simple changes but it will now mean advisers have much more information when they need it, without taking up their or their colleagues day on hold.
For a specialist lender which is much more focused on manual underwriting, where much more of the application is assessed by an actual human being, we need to marry up the work of that individual with the technology/software we have in place, to provide the important case milestone notifications as they happen.
Of course, we fully expect advisers will still want to call us, particularly those who need help on existing applications. Again, we work hard to keep the ‘on hold’ time of these calls down to an absolute minimum and have a dedicated phone team specifically to handle inbound calls of this nature, made up of Telephone Case Managers trained to know exactly what stage a case sits at, to know what is required to progress it, and to impart that information to advisers.
In addition to this team, we have created a second outbound telephone team specifically to call out to advisers and obtain the last piece of information or documentation to progress a case to offer. As a result of this action and increasing our headcount for these teams, our inbound call answer time is down to just 50 seconds, and of course advisers also have access to our BDMs, who are another highly important part of our adviser communication strategy.
Overall, what we want to do is respond to the way advisers interact with us. To take away the need for unnecessary calls because advisers will have the information they need already, and to prioritise those inbound calls where advisers require updates and clarity on what is happening with their case and what they need to do to progress it.
Information is power here and we hope these changes make advisers’ relationships with their clients super-charged.
Mark Whitear is director of commercial development at Foundation Home Loans