Who couldn't use more business nowadays? In the latest issue of National Mortgage News it was reported that Mark Zandi of Moody's economy.com doesn't see a recovery until 2010. And David Seiders of the National Home Builders was quoted as saying, "most indicators point toward further deterioration."
As a result, getting the most out of every borrower, including repeat business and referrals is even more important in this market. So what do lenders do? The obvious answer is invest in a good customer relationship management tool. And while this may be a good first step, there is much more required.
CRM technology, in order to be effective, needs to be taken to the next level. While there are a lot of data management and card companies out there, they're very siloed in their approach. It's no longer about managing a relationship, it's about gaining knowledge that enables the lender to execute on a plan that will get more volume in the door automatically with very little human interaction.
So, lenders should forget CRM (Customer Relationship Management) technology and move toward what I'll call ACTTIVE (Automating Customer Trends & Transaction Intelligence for Volume Enhancement) technology. How is this possible? Lenders need to think holistically about their systems.
I recently got a demo from The Turning Point (
Aside from the usual bells an whistles, it goes further to automatically drive new business by turning information into knowledge that can be executed on. For example, professional referrals may not be stored in the LOS, but this system doesn't care because it'll pull them from your Realtor or other source of referrals and create a custom library for each source. From there it can draw on the closed loan information in the LOS to graphically show (notice the chart below) a lender where most of their business is coming from. So what you might ask, well Judy Margrett, co-founder of The Turning Point, explained, "We can track information down to the borrower level. If I know that Borrower X does investment real estate deals I can go back and offer him a product that he might be looking for instead of just spamming. Each day the system will tell the user how many possible leads like this they can follow up on that day. From there an automated campaign can be executed that's tailored to that specific borrower.
"As we launch this platform we're integrating to other companies to make getting new business seamless. With this platform the possibilities are endless. For example, I could pull an automated valuation model on a property I financed with Borrower ABC last year, see how much equity is on that property, pull their credit, get a pre-approval and say to that borrower through an automated campaign that is electronically triggered that they're pre-approved for this HELOC, just click sign these disclosures and you're ready to go.
"The point of this system is to drive new business so the lender doesn't have to wait or depend as much on individual LOs. This is about monitoring, measuring and maximizing data. You're creating intellectual capital from your database," concluded Ms. Margrett.
By the way if you want to do everything electronic and move into the e-closing world, the system integrates with the Postal Service to auto check addresses on the fly and mapquest.com so the lender can get directions on how to get to the house to deliver all that information directly to a notary or closing agent. It's amazing what can be done with data when it is made accessible and used intuitively to create real business value, don't you think?PLEASE LEAVE YOUR COMMENTS BELOW. JOIN THE CONVERSATION. ALSO, BE SURE TO VISIT
