Customer satisfaction and engagement are critical for servicers to build lasting relationships and retain clients. Servicer retention rates dropped to 10-year lows in 2Q 2017, with servicers losing business from nearly 80% of their borrowers. Improving mortgage retention rates increases the likelihood a consumer will continue working with their existing bank or mortgage provider on their next financial decision, such as a home equity loan or their next mortgage. Black Knight, a leading mortgage industry fintech, has developed a unique solution to aid servicers in building these relationships, increasing retention and achieving future business growth.
Defining the Personal Connection
Black Knight began developing this solution by asking how a servicer with thousands – or even millions – of customers could find an economical way to create a meaningful, personal connection with each one. In today’s world of instant access to unlimited information and helpful advice, the best way for a mortgage servicer to build a personal connection with their customers is to empower them with the information and functionality they need to make their own decisions regarding their home wealth.
Research has shown that customer empowerment has a positive impact on customer engagement. Through the advancements being made in digital technology, consumers expect to have the tools necessary to access information, analyze results and make decisions independently. Armed with everything needed to determine choices, and the ability to crowdsource information from online reviews and other channels for feedback, today’s customer prefers to make decisions without the advice of a traditional expert.
Continuous, Meaningful Engagement
One of the most promising ways for servicers to build and maintain long-lasting customer relationships is to harness the power and agility of digital technology and put it into the hands of their customers. This allows for open, quick and continuous engagement by giving customers access to the information and analysis they need to make decisions—with or without the servicer’s direct involvement.
Black Knight’s Servicing Digital is a robust, mobile customer retention and engagement tool. Servicers can offer their customers the Servicing Digital tool to provide them detailed, timely and highly personalized information about their home’s value and how much wealth can be built from their real estate assets. Servicing Digital can centralize this information and enable customers to access everything they need to know about their property, mortgage and market area through a native mobile app and responsive web application.
Servicing Digital features intuitive and interactive home, loan and neighborhood dashboards allowing customers to easily access important property- or loan-related information, evaluate options or perform vital tasks, such as making a payment via a mobile device or viewing payment history information. This gives customers the anytime, anywhere control they want while allowing servicers to stay connected to them.
Servicing Digital has the ability to tap into aggregated public records information and deliver customers the most current analytics on their home’s value. Customers can also find out their current home equity, look at refi options to lower monthly payments and view the time-to-payoff impact if they were to make an additional payment curtailment on a monthly basis or as a lump sum.
By accessing the market or neighborhood overviews provided, customers can evaluate their home in comparison to neighboring houses. This information helps them to understand why their home value may be different than the average value of nearby houses and see how the attributes of their home compares to their neighbors. Servicing customers could also look at the price and characteristics of houses that recently sold in their area to consider whether or not to list their own home.
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Meeting Customers at Their Point of Need
Ultimately, customer retention is about meeting customers at their point of need and being readily available when they reach that point. With Black Knight’s Servicing Digital, featuring the servicer’s brand, customers would be able to view in a single, centralized location everything they need to better manage home equity wealth and make more informed decisions about what to do next.
Servicers offering this kind of customer experience can build and strengthen personal connections each time their customer opens the tool, leading to positive impacts on retention and keeping the servicer’s lending arm top of mind when the customer is ready to refinance, apply for a home equity loan or purchase another home.
To learn more about how you can enhance your role as your customers’ trusted advisor, watch this video on the power of Servicing Digital.
Black Knight (NYSE:BKI) is a leading provider of integrated software, data and analytics solutions that facilitate and automate many of the business processes across the homeownership life cycle. As a leading fintech, Black Knight is committed to being a premier business partner that clients rely on to achieve their strategic goals, realize greater success and better serve their customers by delivering best-in-class software, services and insights with a relentless commitment to excellence, innovation, integrity and leadership. For more information on Black Knight, please visit www.BlackKnightInc.com.
