The Stratmor Group, Peachtree City, Ga., has launched MortgageSAT, a customer survey and analytics application that captures consumer feedback and allows lenders to measure and respond to borrower satisfaction.
The program uses the patented technology of the American Customer Satisfaction Index, which was developed at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business and gauges satisfaction across over 50 industries. CFI Group, which runs the ACSI, is partnering with Stratmor.
Stratmor managing director Garth Graham said the service looks to measure customer satisfaction at the retail originator level. Furthermore the survey will cover satisfaction with vendors such as appraisers.
Initially, he expects large retail lenders to be interested in using this product.
“It is a standardized survey process which would be valid for any consumer via any lender. [The originator] would provide us a list, a data file, of all the closed loan customers for the previous day, or two days or however they decide to set it up.
“We then survey them through an online portal and we then measure satisfaction across five elements of the process: the application process, the [loan processing and underwriting] process, the appraisal process, closing, and products and cost,” Graham said in an interview.
The lender gets the survey results for its company and because of the standardized nature of the survey, it is able to compare those results to industry benchmarks.
He added the online portal also provides significant analytics to determine why the customer’s overall satisfaction is what it is and what was impacted. This gives the originator a tool to see where it needs to invest, such as the areas which have the highest effect on satisfaction.
The difference between this and typical customer satisfaction surveys are that those typical reviews were not created with a lot of science behind them, Graham said. They might give a certain comfort level, but no insight into what to invest in to maintain and improve customer satisfaction.
Stratmor does have plans to share information for the industry in general to use for benchmarking.
“Customer satisfaction is a dangerous blind spot for the lender because it has become a focal point for our new regulator,” said Stratmor Group senior partner Matt Lind in a press release.
“The result has been a trend in the industry toward more responsiveness and transparency regarding the consumer's experience in the mortgage process. Until MortgageSAT, lenders have largely been guessing because they didn’t have the data or the analytics to know how satisfied their customers were and what they should do about it.”
Graham added in the interview MortgageSAT is a way to show mortgage regulators that the originator is serious about measuring customer satisfaction and taking action to improve the results.
MortgageSAT offers a way for lenders to know how borrowers feel about the mortgage transaction, giving the institution an opportunity to track experience across a wide array of transactions and react immediately to issues.
According to the Harvard Business Review, a one-point change in ACSI is associated with a 4.6% change in market value.
“This is critical for the mortgage industry because as the refinance business falls away, making sure customers are satisfied is how lenders will gain market share through greater referrals and customers cross-sells,” added Graham.
