Customer service can make or break a company’s relationships with its clients. Just take a look at these statistics from surveyed customers:
- 75% have recommended companies based on their customer service.
- 96% say customer service has influenced their level of loyalty.
- 77% say poor customer service has detracted from their quality of life.
As you can see, customer service is a powerful differentiator. While the value of customer service is clear, you may be wondering, “What does good service entail?”
In this article, we’ll discuss seven factors that contribute to excellent customer service and highlight how we embody these factors here at Certified Credit. We’ll also provide some tips for mortgage lenders who are looking to improve their customer service and borrower satisfaction.
Table of Contents
#1 Smooth Onboarding Support
Outstanding customer service begins during the onboarding stage. During this time, customers often need some extra guidance and support as they overcome the learning curve of their new products and services.
At Certified Credit, we provide training sessions around your schedule to ensure you can use our products and services with ease. Better yet, we’ve developed many of our products to integrate with your existing LOS so you enjoy an even smoother transition.
#2 Empathy
Customers who are facing issues with their products or services want to feel understood and taken care of by their service representatives. By exhibiting empathy, customer support teams can meet this need and cultivate positive, long-lasting relationships with their customers.
At Certified Credit, we’re proud to report that our Client Success team is made up of FCRA-certified experts who have a passion for helping our clients. We believe that your success is our business, so we approach your inquiries with dedication and enthusiasm.
This people-focused approach is what inspired our company tagline: More Than Just a Score. In addition to providing affordable credit reports and mortgage lending solutions, we aim to cultivate strong relationships and strengthen trust with our clients every step of the way.
#3 Efficiency
When B2B clients reach out to their customer service representatives, they want their issues resolved quickly so they can get back to running their business. Long delays in support have the potential to hurt their bottom lines. For this reason, efficiency is a critical component of good customer service.
At Certified Credit, we prioritize efficiency at every stage, as displayed by these statistics:
- 95%+ of our customer service calls are answered in 30 seconds or less – When you call, we answer! Our Client Success team answers calls within ten seconds, on average, ensuring you receive swift service and solutions.
- 75% of credit supplements are completed the same day, while nearly 90% are completed within two days – Our Automated Credit Supplements allow you to update your borrowers’ tradeline information without relying on time-consuming conference calls. Instead, your borrowers can update their financial data at their convenience using a secure link. The best part? We complete the majority of these credit supplements within the same day, enabling you to expedite your time to close.
- Over 50% of our manual VOEs are completed within two days – Cascade VOE, our automated verification of income and employment (VOE) solution, can streamline your verifications significantly. Using a rules-based engine, it cycles through your chosen third-party and consumer-permissioned vendors until it receives a hit. While Cascade VOE boasts a high hit rate, not every verification can be completed automatically. Those that aren’t are sent to our attentive Manual VOE team, who have a proven track record of fulfilling over half of these verifications within two days.
By addressing your issues promptly and providing efficient service, we can help you keep your business running smoothly. In turn, your applicants can enjoy an even better borrower experience.
#4 Diversity
Currently, homebuyer demographics are becoming increasingly diverse—by 2040, 70% of new homeowners are predicted to be of Hispanic heritage. Mortgage lenders who want to thrive in an increasingly diverse housing market are staffing their teams to reflect these changing demographics.
At Certified Credit, we believe mortgage lending vendor partners should follow suit, too. That’s why we’ve made sure that over 30% of our Client Success and support teams are fluently bilingual. In turn, our clients can enjoy reliable, convenient communication in multiple languages.
#5 Domestic Expertise
In the United States, 68% of businesses outsource key departments to companies in other countries, including their customer support call centers. While offshoring customer support can cut costs, it often does so to the detriment of the customer experience.
Onshore support teams, in contrast, win out for the following reasons:
- Domestic customer service teams provide superior service – Research shows that offshore call centers only resolve complex issues 45% of the time, while their onshore counterparts do so 88% of the time. By keeping their customer support teams onshore, companies can provide higher quality service.
- Domestic customer service teams offer more reliable security – In many industries, including the mortgage industry, data security is of utmost importance. Companies that outsource their customer service relinquish control of their customers’ data security, potentially putting their clients’ data at risk.
- Domestic customer service teams are more familiar with local regulations and market conditions – Mortgage markets can vary significantly from one country to the next. As a result, most lenders prefer working with customer support representatives who have first-hand knowledge of the laws, regulations, and market conditions they’re facing. Onshore customer service teams are much more likely to satisfy this requirement than those operating from other countries.
For these reasons, we’ve chosen to keep our Client Success team 100% on shore at Certified Credit.
#6 Customized Solutions
No two customers are exactly the same. This is especially true in the mortgage industry, where every lender has a unique origination process. Thus, good customer service requires representatives to take a more personalized approach to resolving problems.
In order to do so, companies must take the time to understand their clients’ business processes, target markets, goals, and needs. Here at Certified Credit, our team of workflow optimization experts does just that. After mapping out your mortgage lending operations, we’ll suggest a custom suite of solutions that can make the greatest impact for the lowest cost.
Speaking of cost, we also offer creative pricing models to help you find a product bundle that suits your budget. Our Client Success team can help you select the best pricing model for your needs.
#7 Reliable Uptime
While customer service is very important, the ultimate goal is to reduce clients’ need for it by producing high-quality solutions with dependable uptimes. When products and services perform reliably, customers naturally have fewer reasons to reach out to customer support.
At Certified Credit, our products and services boast a 99.00% system uptime, enabling you to conduct business with minimal disruptions.
How To Provide Excellent Customer Service as a Mortgage Lender
So far, we’ve discussed what constitutes superior customer service for B2B companies, like Certified Credit. But what about mortgage lenders? While your customer base is different from ours, many of the same principles apply.
According to research conducted by McKinsey & Company, you can improve your customer service by:
- Responding to applicants’ inquiries quickly
- Explaining your lending process and loan options transparently
- Completing tasks accurately the first time around
- Reassuring applicants at every stage
- Developing educational materials
- Offering personalized support
- Using digital tools to make the lending process more efficient and convenient
- Automating repetitive processes so you have more time to dedicate to your borrowers
- Checking in with past and present clients at the right times
At Certified Credit, our mortgage lending solutions are designed to facilitate all of the steps listed above. For example, our Cascade line of automated solutions can streamline your workflows so you have more time to attend to customers. We also have several credit score improvement tools you can use to coach your applicants into better creditworthiness, enabling them to qualify for better rates.
Additionally, many of our solutions, from our Flex ID SmartSelect Shield to our fraud and risk mitigation tools, can improve the accuracy of your operations, enabling you to originate loans faster and with fewer errors. By taking advantage of tools like these, you can bolster your borrower experience while simultaneously cutting costs, enhancing efficiencies, and boosting customer retention.
Experience Exceptional Customer Service By Partnering WIth Certified Credit
In summary, good customer service comes down to supportive onboarding, empathetic service, efficient assistance, diverse teams, domestic expertise, customized offerings, and reliable performance. We take great pride in embodying all of these components at Certified Credit.
If you partner with us, you can rest assured that we’ll resolve your issues expediently and provide you with robust solutions that prevent problems from occurring in the first place. Some of our most popular mortgage lending products and services include:
- Affordable credit reports
- Cascade Alerts
- Cascade Prequal
- Cascade UDM
- Cascade VOE
- Automated credit supplements
- Property and valuation support
- Fraud and risk mitigation
- Flood zone determinations
- Underwriting compliance
- Settlement services
Ready to experience the Certified Credit difference? Schedule a credit consultation with our team today.
