It’s difficult to look back over the past 12 months and find any positives that have come out of the pandemic. For advisers it brought radical change including a stop to face to face meetings and for their customers looking to purchase, a swift end to physical viewings. But it has also brought an opportunity to embrace change, welcome new technology, and as a result, streamline processes to give customers what they want; a better experience and more flexibility.
What customers want
McKinsey performed a survey[1] of 1200 residential mortgage customers to better understand their needs and highlight how technology could improve their experiences. And with only 42% to 67% of borrowers saying they are happy with the mortgage process, there is clear room for improvement -especially for traditional banks who lagged behind non-banks by between 20% to 30%.
The survey found that customers have four critical satisfaction dimensions:
- Reassurance – having knowledgeable staff who can guide customer decisions
- Transparency – accurate information about pricing, completion times, and real-time application status
- Simplicity – a clear and simple application, understandable documentation, and credit assessment guidelines
- Speed – customers expect businesses to be able to keep up with their needs
As well as these four critical aspects the survey also uncovered other issues that advisers should concentrate on, such as:
- getting things right first time to avoid nasty surprises
- offering quick, clear, 24/7 status updates
- pre-approval within 24 hours
- providing customers with a single point of contact
Embracing technology
Innovative mortgage technology is available to help deliver these critical dimensions and why wouldn’t you adopt them when the survey showed 60% of customers are comfortable with online applications and 30% are happy with a combination of online and phone or face to face support?
For online applications, solutions such as the easy-to-use Submissions Brain from Mortgage Brain allows advisers to simply complete, submit, administer, and track applications digitally while maintaining a compliant audit trail. With Submissions Brain you can quickly obtain decisions in principles and/or submit full mortgage applications to participating lenders, from one place.
Additionally, the use of other tools in combination, such as Mortgage Brain’s integrated criteria, affordability, and product sourcing solutions has created an industry-leading, powerful one-stop suite of products. This has transformed mortgage sourcing, empowering advisers to speedily source the best mortgage for clients based on a complete picture of the market starting from a product, criteria, or affordability perspective, depending on the specific requirements of the customer. This offers a greater level of transparency across all aspects and gives peace of mind that you’re providing accurate advice built around your customers’ needs.
With our online chat facility, you can rest assured that we’re on hand to offer any support you may need to get the most out of the solutions. Mortgage Brain continues to introduce ways to make adviser processes more efficient enabling you to deliver excellent customer service, even during challenging conditions including constant product, criteria, and policy changes.
