If you want to build and maintain a stream of purchase business, you need to ensure that the services you’re providing to your current borrowers are going above and beyond. This strengthens your overall brand, earns you valuable reviews, and generates referral business. While you likely have a client experience strategy and tools you use on a daily basis to do this, an important way to ensure these things are working is to go to the source – your clients. Are your current clients satisfied? Would they send a friend or family member your way? What would they change about their experience? How can loan officers get this and other types of feedback from their clients? Here are a few tips to get started:
Make it Easy
We’re all busy, and it’s understandable that providing feedback about their experience may not be at the top of your clients’ list. Sending out a survey is a great way to get feedback – and the easier you make this for clients to fill out, the better. Think about the survey itself. How long would it take for a client to fill out? Are there some yes/no questions or simple rating scales? It’s important to make the survey clear and easy to complete. Clients should be able to breeze through in well under a minute by answering some simple questions. And loan officers can provide space for clients to share more detailed feedback at the end if they’d like to. While the more detailed feedback can give you more information, the more simple feedback is significantly better than none at all. Especially when you look at the responses cumulatively, you can pick out important patterns and trends.
Midway Check Point
While we often send surveys at the end of an experience, incorporating a half-way point survey can help loan officers engage with that feedback in real-time. As mentioned above, making it possible to go through quickly and easily with the option to be more detailed is usually the best format. What’s so valuable about this type of survey is that loan officers can then address any dissatisfaction or concerns immediately. Loan officers can also set this up as a conversational check-in if a survey feels too impersonal. The trade off is that some clients feel more comfortable sharing a critique in a survey rather than in person.
Monitor Online Reviews
Not every client is going to reply to your survey, but there’s another way to get a glimpse into their minds. Loan officers should occasionally scope out the reviews that clients have left online about them. A quick google search of your name, business, and city should be enough to direct you to several sites with reviews. While it’s not worth getting consumed with this, it can be a good way to see what people are saying about your business more generally, not just when you ask them.
Reflect
In order for feedback to be valuable, loan officers need to take it in. In any of these strategies, loan officers need to be willing to engage with the feedback they receive. This doesn’t mean accept it all as fact and let one small critique be cause for major concern. But it does mean reflecting honestly on the feedback you receive. Is it aligning with your view of the experience? Are there patterns of consistent satisfaction in certain areas, or maybe a lower rating in other areas? By taking in the information, looking at it as a whole, and taking time to reflect on it, loan officers can use that feedback to continue refining the experience they provide.
Do you seek out feedback from your clients? Which strategies have you found most effective? What do you do with the feedback you receive? I’d love to hear what you think! If you’d like to talk more about getting feedback and strengthening your client experience, don’t hesitate to reach out and set up a time for us to connect.
Don Riggs
VP – Retail Market Leader
NMLS 132702
303.249.8274
