Join Snapdocs, STRATMOR, and Gold Star to discover some of the biggest levers they have found using proprietary customer diagnostics to improve customer satisfaction, and begin uncovering some actionable steps lenders can take today in order to realize significant improvements.
Transcription:
Announcer (
And for our next case study presented by Snap Docs, please welcome David Williams from Gold Star Mortgage Finance, Mike Seminari, Strat Moore Group, and your moderator Peter Robertson from Snap Docs.
Peter Robertson (
All right, welcome everyone. Thanks for joining us for one of the last sessions of the conference. Hope it is been a good week for you all. Today we are talking about a session taking your customer experience to the next level. What we are gonna be going over is this borrower experience index that was a collaboration effort between the strap more group and SNAP Docs. And what is super exciting about it or what I really find interesting is it takes a really, under the cover hood look at how lenders are performing in customer experience across the entire mortgage process from application all the way down to closing. And we will not only will we share the benchmarks, but you will be able to really see how your business can, is perceiving your customer experience versus US benchmarks. And we will start to go over that with Dave at Goldstar.
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So, I will go ahead and kick it off with some introductions. My name is Peter Roberson. I am leading product marketing here at Snap Docs. and really excited to share these results cuz in my role, always talking to customers to deliver the best closing experience, really focusing in on the closing and customer experience is always very top of mind for the lenders. So really excited to have been partnering with Strat Moore Group on this one and bringing the results to the stage. I will pass it over to you, Dave, and then Mike to give some intro.
Dave Williams (
Yeah, Dave Williams Goldstar Mortgage. so I have been the CIO there for five years now. we are a big proponent of customer experience and over being a cio I have customer experience from a different level. I have internal customers, how my LO's feel and then how their customers feel. So I am excited to share the results of this, eye-opening study that Strat Moore put together.
Mike Seminari (
Great. And Mike Seminar. I am with Strat Moore Group, I have been in the industry about 20 years that is been split between mortgage and FinTech. And right now I lead the customer experience division at atmore. And so that actually encompasses everything from journey mapping, secret shopping, digital, strategy design, data collection, reputation management, change management a lot of different things. But, the whole program is called Mortgage cx. But what really drew me into this study was that it is answering some questions that we come across a lot. So we work with a lot of lenders around CX strategy design and you get a lot of, I guess lip service to CX is important. Everybody knows that and everybody thinks it is important to have a strategy. But when you actually sit down and start to design that strategy, there is some really tough questions that you have to answer right away that are tough to answer.
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And one of is what do you measure? And everybody is kind of got their own idea of what drives satisfaction but unless you have a really big data pool, a big, empirical data set, it is hard to know what is gonna give you the biggest lift in nps, call it and what is going to give you the biggest lift in advocacy and repeat business. So if you want to know the answers to those, you really need to ask a lot of questions. You are gonna have a hard time doing that just kind of starting from scratch and thinking it yourself. So this study addresses that. We also address where should you set the bar, which is how high is up, what is the appropriate benchmark to set? What are other lenders doing is really what you need to answer that.
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So it has a benchmarking component to it. And then where do you focus if you are measuring the program that I run with Strat Moore, we did 250,000 surveys last year. And so we have kind of honed in on what are the right questions? What is everybody what are you doing in context with everybody? But then where do you drill down? So to be able to know this is an area where we have a lot of room to grow, so you might look at it versus not just the national average, but versus the best in class. And then where are the areas that we are already ahead of the curve. So being able to choose to answer all of these questions is, is really the first step in a CX strategy design. And that is what we want to help lenders do with this study.
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Now what really intrigued me about this study specifically because you got JD Powers a benchmark out there. They do a lot of work in this area, it is the first of its kind in the sense that it is ongoing. So you do not have to wait 12 months, cross your fingers and, and kind of hope that you have a good ranking on the annual findings that come out. This is updated every quarter and, it is kind of a new thing that we have started, but already to sample sizes is twice the next largest benchmark in the industry. So it is a lot of good data, a lot of ability to see trending. So instead of just a snapshot once a year, you are seeing how is the pandemic affecting it? How are elections affecting it? Rate differences, other economic factors. you are seeing how CX is affected and in moving throughout the year.
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The other thing it does is give you visibility. So if you are a larger lender who shows up typically on the JD power listings, you are gonna show up on this one as well. So we put some logos here. If you see your logo there, that means that the study has a hundred plus responses from your customers. So it let us you peel back the onion in a few different ways. So you get to look at trending of course, how you are doing, how you are moving and progressing throughout the year. If you are making changes, you get to see ranking visibility and not just your overall satisfaction or nps. It is how easy is our closing process? How easy is our doc collection process compared to all the other lenders out there? So some great kind of visibility around that.
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help designing your own CX strategy, knowing what to ask and how to measure. and then being able to compare to national average to the best in class top 10th percentile. And we are also doing a collaboration on this with SNAP docs. So, we are providing a lender diagnostic meaning what do your own employees think of your delivery of the customer experience? So that is a really cool element of it that we are gonna discuss with Dave here in a sec. But, is there alignment with that, with how your employees perceive, with how your execs perceive it, with how you are processing staff, your lows? Does everybody have the same vision? Cuz that is, if you are not on the same place to start, it is really hard to get anywhere. So for midsize lenders, if you are logo's not on here, there is still great value.
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You get to know, how to, what questions to ask. What are the ones that give you the biggest lift in satisfaction. You also get to do that employee evaluation. So it is informing the strategy and if you ask the, some of the same questions, it lets you benchmark against these numbers as well. So, yeah, we are really excited about this. The rankings are going to be coming out every quarter. So if you are interested, if you wanna see your own rankings, we will give you some information that you can hit up strap more or hit up, Peter at Snap Docs after afterwards and you can be part of it. So, great quick note on, sorry, go for it. Quick note on the scope of the project, 701 7,125. people to date have, have responded to it and next largest benchmark. I think last year is sample size was 5,400. So it is a really good data set, really viable in solid. We did it over May and June, this last, data sample, so it is very fresh as well. It is the breakdown of purchase versus refi is about 65 or 69, 31, something like that. So it is very representative of where the industry's at right now. so yeah, back to you. Great.
Peter Robertson (
I want to start digging into the results and especially seeing how Gold Star, you are starting to evaluate that CX strategy design and that employee perception. Because I think that is really valuable as a part of this diagnostic. Before we get into it though, Mike, can you, how I think it is important to contextualize what we are going to see with the results. I get nps, but sometimes the differences can be marginal or large, and I think it is helpful to understand what does that really mean? How should lenders really interpret the results as we go through this?
Mike Seminari (
Sure. Yeah. I mean the, I think most people know nps what that is. It is would you recommend basically that question but what this study really looks at and is that nuance between, I put a line on the screen here, I think the nuance between an eight and nine, we always think NPS as promoters, detractors, would you badmouth this? Would you recommend us? But it is, there is a lot of people in that seven or eight. I had a pretty good experience, eight outta 10. Most people think that is pretty good, but that is the pretty good, but it is not the, you can not shut me up about it. And that is the raving fan is what we are really after. And the reason I think that is important is because there is a huge misconception in the industry, especially with Ellos, that if people like me they are gonna recommend me.
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And the data does not support that. So I think we have a slide on this is what we preach over and over to execs hand hellos is that a broken process with a great guide will not produce raving fans. It is, we use restaurant analogy with the lo being the waiter. You can have an amazing waiter but at the end of the day, if you have mediocre food at that restaurant, I am not recommending that restaurant. Right? Right. Same thing with the lo, you can be a great lo shepherd somebody through a difficult process, but if the process was difficult, you have confusing documents. You have closing starts late on unexpected fees, whatever it is that sours it enough for them that they are, maybe they are not a zero on that NPS scale, but maybe they are seven or eight. They are like yeah, that is pretty good. Yeah. But that does not get your referrals. That does not produce a raving fan. So for Ellos, the big aha moment is if I have some of these things happening on my loan, it might not be my fault, but it forfeit the referral and that costs me business. So if you can get that, that point across the lo it is game changer for them.
Peter Robertson (
Yep. Totally love that analogy. Great. Well let us dig into some of the results we are seeing. Let us start off with the overall mortgage process. How many are experiencing issues and what is some of the impact we are starting to see? I would love for you to take that first mic and then your reactions, Dave, as you were starting to review the results as well.
Mike Seminari (
Yeah, well, you can see on the screen it, it is a big number almost one in four. That was a wow moment of the study is like, we all think we are doing a pretty good job and yet one in four people almost say no, there was some problems. And you can see some of these on this screen. They are pretty low NPS numbers, too many or confusing confusion about the product pricing, too many documenting requests. If you go to the next slide, you can see that is not even the worst of it. The worst of it is look at the last three, lack of communication, slow response times, unprofessional communication. So the worst, the most damaging things you can do are around communication.
Peter Robertson (
Right, Right. What was your reaction to this day when you were starting to review the results?
Dave Williams (
Oh, I was quite surprised by the left side number, seeing almost 25% of all borrowers having some sort of a bad experience throughout their process. and the lack of communication is not a surprise to me. Right, Right. You think about it in terms of anything that we do personally, if like the waiter analogy, right? If the waiter was not good, but the food was great, it is the same, it is the reverse, right? I am not gonna give a good recommendation. And referral communication is key throughout this process. Technology can really help that communication, right? Automate that, making sure that they are getting exactly the communication they need when they need it. Right? Absolutely helps that, but it does not negate that personal touch.
Peter Robertson (
Yeah. I love that. It is the technology can really help reduce the frequency and or the damage of some components of this. If with without some technology throughout the process, you might be at a loss there. Yeah. But it is that wow moment, that you are trying to deliver, which requires a personal touch. So totally agree. And if we start to look at the, all the milestones we analyze from application to closing, I thought this was super interesting. Mike, can you kind of orient us here what we started to find on overall satisfaction with the mortgage process?
Mike Seminari (
Yeah. So what you are seeing on the screen is we looked at what, how much do each of these areas or phases of the blown process affect the overall satisfaction? So what impact does each category have on the overall satisfaction? You can see application and doc collection are actually pretty low, but the pre pre-closing and closing, and that is nearly 70%. And that is all in the last few days of the process. So that there are just, there is just a lot of things that can go wrong at the end of alone that there is confusion. They do not get a call prior to closing. They did not feel prepared for the closing, the closing documents were inaccurate, the closing started late. Like the list goes on and you are at your highest anxiety level at that point, right? And if something goes wrong, you feel it a little bit more in the application process you have if you do not understand your application, you call your loan officer and say, walk me through it.
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Right? We see you get help or you do not get help. It is about the same satisfaction at the end of the day because you are available to help them as an lo. Also we have got great POS tools. That was not the case 10 years ago, I mean, maybe they were around but they were not adopted. So the POS technology has been very highly adopted and very effective and people like it, that is great UIs. There is the dot collection phase, of course.,it is more about communication, there is not a lot of that technology can do in that phase to if you are not communicating with the borrower. And that takes personal touch. So that is, more about training and personnel than it is about technology. Probably that phase. The pre-closing and closing though, there is technology. I mean, Snap Docs is one. but not everybody is using it the sme way or as effectively.
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If we go to the next screen, you will see some of this, like we, these are some of the national scores of overall scores on a thousand point scale on the, in the blue boxes that you can see. And you can see the application starts on a little bit higher note it dips from doc collection because you start experiencing oftentimes, miscommunication, pre-closing and closing and on a higher note because you are excited to get the loan, you are excited to save money on a refi or get get in the house. But if you look at the difference between that and what the best in class companies are doing, some of that is technology. if you click it one more time, you can see we do a CX opportunity score. So where you have the most opportunity between national average investing classes, actually in the closing area where the doc, the lowest performing national average dot collection, the best in class are still only 7 98. that is, so it is, it is like there is the difference between you, you have the same great personalities in dot collections as you do. In closing, the way I read this is something else, some other X factor technology more than likely is creating that extra gap, Right. And opportunity, right? Where the best in class are leveraging technology with the personal touch to get it there,
Peter Robertson (
Right? And as we were conducting the diagnostic, we started to see not only the benchmarks, but also how Gold Star employees started to perceive, each of the milestones. And there is an interesting shape to this graph. I am curious, Dave, when you first saw this, what was your reaction? What are you doing at the, specifically at the closing in regards to the technology and the people that might be creating this lower perception in the customer experience?
Dave Williams (
Yeah, this one was really surprising to me. I mean, kudos to our employees for putting us above best in class across all of these categories. but we have adopted SNAP Docs as our closing platform and that is been instrumental in improving that end user experience at the end of the closing, right. But what I see here in the trajectory going down is I think a lot of our loan officers are falling off after the DOT collection piece and not staying engaged throughout the entire process. And I think that is where we can see the biggest CX opportunity score is stay engaged all the way through to the end. You know, throughout this conference I was listening to Dennis Snow from Disney and the story about the housekeepers tucking those characters in at bed tonight, right? Just to create that last impact at the end of the day to improve that customer experience. And that is really what I think is the issue here. Right?
Peter Robertson (
Right. Yeah.
Mike Seminari (
Also, congratulations your employees. Thank you. The world of your company, the
Peter Robertson (
World of the application. Yeah.
Mike Seminari (
So when I look at this, I see great employees always love and believe in what you are doing. And they should, if you are at a, have a healthy culture at your company, but at the same time, there is blind spots. YThere is if the employees knew we are doing a great job. We believe in cx, we believe in treating customer first, but we are losing referrals. we are forfeiting referral business because of some of the things we are doing, they probably wanna know about that, Right? That they want to know. And it is really hard to collect that when you are doing a three question survey at the end and trying to gather all that data and try to make sense of it. So that is part of what this study is doing, hopefully giving you guys some data that you can take back and start to make some strategic decisions around. Right.
Peter Robertson (
And let us dive into the milestones kind of step by step. I think we will start to see the frequency in the significance of some of the issues in terms of the impact to MP and why even downstream. It is a really big part of that oat, so yeah, let us dive into it. Mike, would you mind taking us through, let us go through the application first and then document collection next?
Mike Seminari (
Yes. So the beginning of the process, I kind of alluded to this before, but what we saw in the numbers is that people love their LO's no surprise. And people thought filling out the application was actually not too bad either. So the beginning of the process borrowers are actually pretty pleased with today if they have troubles, they have access to make it to get their questions answered. So there is not nearly as much pain as we saw five, 10 years ago in this area, yeah keep flipping here. So when you start moving into doc requests, then you have the breakdown in communication. So, we asked this question, were the docu requests reasonable? Because it is a subjective question, we want to know the feel, not necessarily did this happen or did this not happen? So it is, but we also ask the other side of that, which is, did somebody ask you for doxy already provided, which is super annoying to everybody.
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What was interesting to me, well first of all, it is huge drop if it is not reasonable. So if the feel is wrong, you are not communicating well. 70 point drop if the ask is made twice, somebody uploads a doc, you do not recognize it, you do not update the portal, whatever it is, that is happening 36% of the time, that is a lot. When we asked, I think we actually asked Dave's, group this, if we have that executive side was pretty good. You guys were pretty good at that, right? Yeah. In fact, everybody kind of did, thought they were pretty good at it. The dotted line is, what was your reaction to this? I guess?
Dave Williams (
To me first the ease of providing docs for the loan officers, clearly I have to communicate to them. I am kind of surprised by that. but yeah. Did we not ask docs already provided, everyone says we do a great job now we do have a pos like you said five years ago, this would have probably been much lower. Yeah. Right. and we have tools around that to make sure that we are only asking for what is really required for the loan and that we are checking things off the list. Right? So we have done a lot in terms of technology to make sure that we are enhancing that front end experience for the borrower and then we have done more on the back end.
Peter Robertson (
Right. And that is a good segue. let us get into, some of the closing. So, we call back at the earlier in the presentation, 70% of that overall satisfaction in pre-closing and closing. Let us go into pre-closing first, Mike. What are we starting to see with pre-sent prep and then, yeah,
Mike Seminari (
Yeah, I mean it is the big impact we mentioned before, so the last three days of the process, basically where all this stuff is happening, but the first one we asked was, were you informed of options? And turns out one in five people say no, I was not informed of closing options. And the other one and of course, 35 point drop in NPS is pretty big. Same drop in MP for the next question. Did somebody call you and go over the final numbers with you? So with the nuance of this one, 25% said no one in four is Ellos will and sometimes processors, whoever this falls to will say no. I called them, I left them a message and asked them if they wanted to go over the final numbers and they check it off of the list and they go on their merry way.
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But in the borrower's mind, no, I didn't have a conversation about it. So they answered no and then NPS drops incredibly. So it is part, I mean, it is the extra effort. We talked about the nuance between the eight and the nine. The eight is they made an effort, the nine is, they made sure they got me on the phone and we went over the hard parts of the contract or whatever it is. So I mean, you go, honestly it takes five to 10 minutes for somebody to call and go over the note. The hud that is basically the main stuff you gotta cover with them. So any fees, any rates, right. So that are gonna be surprises possibly. So yeah,
Dave Williams (
I wanna talk about this real fast. So we actually have modified a lot of our processes from approval to closing to include a communication touchpoint. Yeah. So a about a year ago we had our automated clear to close going out to our borrowers. We found that was causing a lot of problems because the borrower got super excited. They had a bunch of questions, they were reaching out to the LO's, they allowed, did not even know it was clear to close yet. And they are trying to schedule their closings and they are like, Whoa, whoa, whoa. So we have actually eliminated that piece of automation and we just sent it to the loan officer and we got the loan officer to pick up that phone and call that buyer, Congratulations, your loan is been clear to close. And then here is what is gonna happen next. Then when our closers go and they create the hybrid e closing with SNAP docs, there is an automated email that goes out from our closer, Hey, I am your closer. We are gonna get you to the finish line. And they even schedule, they offer to schedule a touchpoint with the borrower to go over all those docs in the platform.
Peter Robertson (
That is an awesome callback to the theme we are hitting on here with the personal touch plus the technology. And I think additionally to that, we asked about the preview of the closing documents, which would play a little bit more into that technology investment piece that can help alleviate some of those customer experience impacts. Because what we found is a similar drop in frequency, just similar drop in nps as well as a little bit less frequency in terms of bars not being able to preview their documents and having adequate time to preview their closing documents, but would be solved with technology investments downstream. Like, ECL close. exactly, but not you would not be solving that prior slide in terms of pre-sign preparation without that touchpoint from the loan
Dave Williams (
Officer. Exactly. Right.
Peter Robertson (
Awesome. We have five minutes left, so I am gonna speed on through. Yeah, go. We also started to look at, how your employees are perceiving the pre-closing and closing steps. I think what is interesting is in the call prior to closing and importance of lo availability is a pretty big disparity here with executives and loan officers. But on the ease of the closing, it seems like, you know, you all rate yourself above the national average. It is pretty easy, so as you were reviewing this, what was your reaction,
Dave Williams (
I was a bit surprised because well, I should not say I am a bit surprised the right side, the loan officer is thinking highly of themselves. I am not surprised at all. Everyone is a lender in this room that they think they are, the bees knees, if not, but the executives and fulfillment even is more eye-opening to me because executives are not involved in that end user process in the nitty gritty really. But what they are getting are the calls from irate customers and things like that. So they know these tape things are happening, fulfillment is heavily involved, and they know that the borrower or the loan officer has not touched base. So clearly we have a disparity in what loan officers feel they are doing and what is actually happening.
Peter Robertson (
Right, right. That makes sense. Last piece we wanted hit on, Mike, I will toss this over to you on the closing issues. So go closing.
Mike Seminari (
Yeah. We kinda saved the best for less, right? Yeah. Or the big wow of the biggest wow of the study for me was did you have any closing issues? And almost 40% said yes, 7,000 people crossed the nation, 40% said they had closing issues. some of were closing, did not start on time. Paperwork was confusing, fees were not what I expected. Some documents were missing, they were inaccurate that is kind of an alarm bell for the industry, right? If some of this can be tackled with technology, some of it is people. So in training, some of it is just being involved at the end of the process. And for the lo do you show up at closing? Are you available on the day of closing? If somebody has a question that can, help a lot, Right? Cover a lot of sins here.
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But this was, so big deal. We have major issues with the closing. We have not solved for this yet. We have started to really solve for the p for the, point of sale dot collection will always be kind of a training issue, with communication. But are you showing up at the end? Are you handling these things? Are you providing visibility? Some of that again is technology, some of its people. But that was for anybody, you came here and and just thought, Hey, we are doing a great job. Do you really know if you are doing a great job? You know, have you pulled back the curtain? Have you asked the questions of your customer? We all want a short survey, but sometimes you gotta ask more questions to really uncover some of this stuff. And that is what the Strat Mars program does. And that is why we have all this kind of benchmarking, so, Yeah. Right,
Peter Robertson (
Right. I guess to wrap this up, Mike what can lenders start to expect, if they start to take this diagnostic with strap more and SNAP docs and yeah.
Mike Seminari (
Yeah. Well, let me take 15 seconds just to address this slide. If you are here today, you want to couple takeaways. One is provide more visibility at the end of the process. Maybe you need technology for that. There are technology companies that are doing that. Borrowers, title companies, LO's, everybody needs more visibility because a lot of stuff can go wrong. Two, provide, try to provide documents ahead of time, at least three days. One in five customers saying that they did not have time to preview documents is not good enough. Or even if it was one in 10, it is, we can solve for that, right? It is easy if we just change our processes. The third one is make sure it is a common practice to schedule time with the borrower prior to closing to go over or final numbers.
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Not a voicemail. Actually nail down for 15 minutes of their time. And that should just be drilled in from training to kingdom come. That is so important right at the end of the process to be involved, but anyway, if you came today and you are thinking this interesting data, would love to be sitting in Dave's chair and say like, this is what my company actually thinks of our own delivery of customer service. If you are one of the logos we showed and you are like, What do our customers actually think compared to the national average compared to best in class? Where do we rank in all these categories? That is all available and we would be happy to have a conversation with you about That, it is no cost and we are doing it right now for a limited time, just free. So, hit us up and we would love to chat with you. And I think you can do the QR code there. So
Peter Robertson (
Yeah, you can do the QR code or go to this url. We will have a white paper. We only scratch the surface here, I think in the presentation short time. We had the white paper has a little bit more, detail to help you contextualize what we have went over here and of course, submit your email and we are happy to take a diagnostic with your team. It only requires a handful of employees in a a five to 10 minute survey. And we will review these results and help you inform CX strategy where you perform against your peers, understand where to prioritize investments and yeah, we look forward to speaking with you. Thanks so much, thanks for joining us today, you all. Thank you. Have your safe travels home.