The TRUTH is mortgage lending is tougher now than it has ever been. Underwriting guidelines have never been more complicated, there are more documentation requirements than I can ever remember, and now unlike any time in our nation’s history, we have legal restrictions and disclosure requirements coming from a half dozen government bureaucracies. It’s enough to drive you insane!
Today clients face more red tape than ever before and it can cause the customer experience to be often less than desirable and for some, down right miserable. That’s the norm for our industry today and many of the big banks are pulling back from mortgage originating because of it. Why do you think Chase, CITI, B of A and Wells have all raked in huge record profits over the last year but are simultaneously announcing they are scaling back their mortgage departments? Red tape, regulation and doing a great job originating loans in this climate is incredibly difficult.
That is the norm for today’s mortgage experience, but it is not the norm for our clients. We are a boutique and niche division of Citywide Home Loans and we’ve engineered systems, hired the right people and trained experts to not only get your loan closed, but to knock your socks off with service and communication.
Quite simply, our goal is provide every client with an insanely good mortgage experience.
So we’re putting our money where our mouth is. Starting this month, we are going to publicly post ALL of our customer satisfaction questionnaires in the form of an end of the month report card. As far as I know, we are the only mortgage group in the country to publicly (and honestly) report 100% of our client feedback from the closing table.
Click here for Report Card PDF.
Now is this going to look good for us all the time? No, the reality is the process of originating a loan today is difficult and no matter how hard we try, we will make some mistakes and there will be some clients we can’t make happy.
But here’s the deal, we believe in integrity and transparency (novel concepts for a mortgage lender, we know) and we know we are not perfect. So we hope this crazy experiment will do two things:
First, we hope that it will give you, our next potential client, insight as to what our clients actually say about us the day of closing. There is no sales pitch here, just straight feedback from our clients. In doing so, it’s my hope that you will see we do a fantastic job the majority of the time.
Second, we know we are not perfect. As a group, when we decide to post not only our success but our failures publicly, it makes us all perform better (for you) and it forces us to stare our shortcomings in the face, admit our mistakes and create systems that will eliminate those mistakes going forward.
So here’s how our clients completed their customer satisfaction questionnaires for January 2014.
Excellent 85%
Good 10%
Fair 5%
Poor 0%
For the month, I score us as an A-.
As a result of studying the questionnaires and then calling to discuss them with clients, we made one system change in how we coordinate between the loan officer, team lead and processor, all of which will have some contact and coordination with you as the client.
We will continue to build on our successes and learn from our failures, we hope doing so in this way will give you a look behind the curtain, so to speak, and help you learn a little bit more about who we are and what we stand for before choosing us as your mortgage lender.
Sincerely,
Josh Mettle
