Highlights:
- Financial services organizations must be agile to remain competitive, and today, that includes adopting digital technologies as they emerge.
- Advanced contact center platforms can help lenders and mortgage servicers provide an omnichannel experience for customers.
- Leveraging omnichannel communications and AI-powered analytics can create operational efficiencies for lending and mortgage servicing.
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Lenders and mortgage servicing organizations must be agile to adapt to a constantly changing technology landscape and ever-shifting consumer preferences.
Today, lending and mortgage servicing benefit most from two key areas of digital technology:
- Digital communication channels, such as email, SMS, chat, and social
- Analytics, fueled by borrowers’ behaviors and responsiveness to formats other than email or letters, big data, and artificial intelligence (AI), along with more sophisticated IVR capabilities to filter and re-route the borrower to the appropriate digital channel
These technologies provide the tools lenders need to make communications and decision-making more efficient at every step in the lending and mortgage servicing process.
Use all the digital communication channels at your disposal
The proliferation of digital channels means there are more ways to meet consumers than ever before, but it also means you have to understand which channels your customer prefers to ensure you are providing the best possible customer experience for them.
According to research from Bellomy, customers today express a distinct preference for lenders that make digital communications available. In a recent survey, two-thirds of Gen Y/Z and 59 percent across all generations indicated that they would move to a 100-percent contactless loan process if it were made available to them.
Source: Bellomy, https://www.bellomy.com/blog/mortgage-lenders-evolving-omnichannel-experience
Meeting the demands of a digital-first customer base necessitates adopting an omnichannel communications strategy and investing in the technology to support it. A cloud-based, advanced contact center platform designed for financial services facilitates seamless omnichannel communication, including capabilities such as:
- Telephony
- Text or SMS messaging
- Cloud-based file sharing and storage
- Task management tools for team collaboration
- Integration with other business applications
- Video conferencing
- Enhanced security features to protect business and customer data
- Built-in analytics
Advanced contact center platforms enable digital transformation for financial services, a key priority for lenders. That is why lenders are making significant investments in digital technologies now. According to a recent Aite survey of North American lenders, 53 percent of lenders have upgraded or will upgrade their ability to communicate with borrowers through a variety of channels.
To engage customers more fully, investments in chatbot/conversational banking solutions, agent bots, and omnichannel delivery solutions are top of mind for lenders.
Source: Aite, https://aite-novarica.com/report/consumer-lenders%E2%80%99-plans-navigating-next-normal
Use digital channels at every stage of lending and mortgage servicing processes
Omnichannel communications impact every stage of lending and mortgage servicing processes from marketing to post-closing communications and collections. The same Aite survey revealed that lenders are increasing their technology spend across the board to make their processes more effective and efficient, with 29 percent make a significant investment in marketing and loan origination technologies, 19 percent making significant investments in fraud, data, and analytics technologies, and 14 percent making significant investments in collections technologies.
Source: Aite, https://aite-novarica.com/report/consumer-lenders%E2%80%99-plans-navigating-next-normal
Omnichannel communications for marketing and portfolio management
An omnichannel marketing approach includes creating a unified and positive experience for borrowers at every touchpoint. Common channels for marketing to customers include text, social media, email, voice, and even video.
Examples of how to use an omnichannel approach to marketing may include:
- Engaging prospects and borrowers across multiple communication channels with consistent brand messaging.
- Providing personalized one-on-one messaging based on the borrower journey
- Offering customers their choice of communication channel for status updates and alerts
- Sending tailored communication across text, print, email, phone, chat, or video
Omnichannel communications for origination and collections
Digital channels are increasingly important for the loan origination and collections processes as well. Ninety percent of lenders believe that digital loan origination is necessary to remain competitive, 35 percent have largely automated their loan origination process, and 68 percent offer an online portal for consumers to upload documents and check their loan application status.
Omnichannel communications enable lenders to streamline their collections processes as well. For example, deploying AI-powered chatbots, text messages, or interactive voice response systems to engage lower-risk customers is more cost-effective and efficient than deploying live agents to do so. Additionally, giving delinquent account holders multiple options for contact can increase the likelihood of successful engagement.
Leverage analytics fueled by borrowers’ behaviors, big data, and artificial intelligence
An exciting technology development that holds great promise for streamlining and enhancing operational processes for lenders and mortgage servicers is artificial intelligence, particularly machine learning technology. According to recent research, as lenders see the business need to incorporate more data, they are turning to advanced analytics powered by AI to use their data in a manageable way that adds value.
Here’s how North American respondents answered the question “Does your company employ artificial intelligence (AI) such as machine learning in any of the following stages of the loan life cycle?”:
Source: Aite, https://aite-novarica.com/report/alternative-data-and-artificial-intelligence-critical-tools-lending-toolbox
By combining omnichannel communications with the power of artificial intelligence, lenders and mortgage servicers are seeing a significant leap in operational efficiency. Machine learning, a subset of AI, can help lenders:
- Refine credit models
- Enhance lending and security policies
- Improve fraud detection and prevention
- Streamline underwriting processes
- Provide more efficient and effective communication with prospects and existing borrowers
- Enhance the borrower journey
- Improve collections efforts with predictive analytics
As just one example of processes that can be improved with AI, consider the collections process. Using predictive analytics, mortgage servicers can identify early warning signs of financial distress in accounts that have not yet become delinquent. Armed with this information, collections departments can reach out to customers proactively, offering options to prevent delinquency before it happens.
Applying machine learning technology to the large datasets owned by lenders can yield significant information for collections, such as which digital channels are most effective for contacting delinquent borrowers, and even when to time communications for best effect. Simply put, these digital technologies can help lenders predict delinquencies, segment groups of accounts as needed, and prioritize where to deploy resources to resolve collections efficiently.
RingCentral: Omnichannel capabilities combined with advanced analytics for lenders
Forward-thinking financial services organizations realize that leveraging digital technologies is the only way to remain competitive in today’s mortgage landscape. RingCentral offers lenders and mortgage servicers an advanced contact center platform that incorporates AI-powered advanced analytics.
With RingCentral, lenders can:
- Engage with customers across multiple digital channels securely
- Automate workflows and connect distributed teams in one centralized, cloud-based workspace
- Automatically filter and route calls based on service need
- Integrate core collection and servicing apps for real-time customer information
- Get powerful analytics to determine the best digital channel and method to reach the borrower
To see how our advanced contact center platform works to meet your most pressing lending and mortgage servicing needs, request a demo of our advanced contact center capabilities to power your collection strategies today.
Originally published Nov 02, 2021, updated Dec 30, 2022
