Cool stuffs mortgage servicers can do with the new-age CRM

Vibhor Mishra

This decade has seen the emergence of commoditized and competitive markets, and mortgage services is no exception. Online touchpoints have been created already to serve millennials better, who are obviously looking for new experiences, better terms, and niche products.

Online social relationships, transactions, and shopping make young adults feel at ease, and they expect mortgage solutions to be no different. Hence, it is important for mortgage stakeholders to leverage raw transactional data along with soft data acquired through social listening and online activities, as they seek to create valuable customer experiences.

Data mining from Customer Relationship Management(CRM) can offer loan originators and mortgage servicers a veritable goldmine of intelligence that can improve business processes, products and communication. A “brainy dashboard” which combines data gleaned from multiple sources and divergent platforms can empower decision making. New tools help in unifying multiple data formats, which then combined with predictive insights, help identify the market trends.

Social CRM for niche campaigns

It is about time banks leverage social media for educational and marketing campaigns. Social media communities of loan officers, real-estate brokers, and prospective borrowers need to be developed to create a positive vibe in the market. Discussion groups, chats, publishing, news sharing, and content sharing are avenues through which lenders can deliver key information to their clientele.

Today, niche solution providers, like lenders catering to Distressed Home Owners (DHOs), can create a platform where employees, executives, and prospective customers can come together, interact and speak out on key deliverables. Social media communities are the key to gain Business Intelligence(BI) about products and offer insights about the shortcomings that can be effectively tackled.

Social media listening is the next-gen technological tool that can be integrated with existing CRM solutions. This helps to monitor user-generated content in key mortgage networking sites. The raw data is combined with strong predictive analytics and business intelligence to deliver user-friendly information for decision making.

The current sentiments are compared with historical data to perform trend analysis and take pre-emptive actions. All the information about products, placements, promotions, and perceptions can be analyzed to formulate strategies or bring changes in terms of products, services, and marketing communications.

Social media also continues to be the most potent tool for lenders delivering niche campaigns. For example, a lender can identify a customer who may need an education loan from social posts celebrating a great SAT score. It is also about understanding possible financial turmoil that increases the risk of default. Such information can be utilized by lenders to proactively pitch a particular campaign to this segment or enable better structuring of loans. Preemptive action can differentiate services from other lenders in the market and generate customer goodwill and satisfaction.

CRM technology for hyper-personalization

CRM applications can help build a complete picture of customers by recording online, offline, and transactional activities. So your customers’ behavioral patterns such as likes, dislikes, favorite colors, friends, buying habits, budgets and more can be harnessed to put every individual into a niche. New tools like streaming technologies can capture real-time data about customers. Combined with BI, it can generate a highly personalized buyer profile.

The 360-degree view about an individual brings the alignment of sales, marketing, product development, and customer servicing. Marketers can monitor the movement of customers through the marketing funnel and deliver the right communication.

For eons, lenders have enjoyed an upper hand. Customers depended on loan officers for information and guidance on moving through the loan process. But with new technologies and internet of things, new-age borrowers are relying on online technologies to educate themselves about products, compliance, and regulation. Today’s customers demand individual attention and select specialists in niche financial solutions. For lenders, it is important to know customers at the micro-level and be available across platforms, channels, applications, and devices.

CRM solutions can help piece together complete customer profiles through online, offline, and social media interactions. They can go a long way micro-segmenting consumers and developing long-lasting relationships through perception management and bespoke solutions.

The author is Director Marketing, Tavant Technologies