Generating Business
Having experienced, well-trained originators with high-caliber support staffs is great. But the bottom line is closing loans. This survey asked top producers about what has led to their sustained success.

The message was loud and clear: delivering excellent service and good information to customers is the core of building a great mortgage business.

Customer Satisfaction

By an overwhelming margin (97 percent), top producers rated having satisfied customers as “very important” to their overall success. Moreover, employers recognize the importance of customer satisfaction, as reflected by the fact that 77 percent of them survey their customers about their experience with the mortgage process.

Drilling down further, the top producers ranked which elements of customer satisfaction are most important and which seem to have the least impact. Three actions easily top the list:

• Closing loans on time (88 percent),

• The initial discussion about the loan process (86 percent) and

• Personal attention from the loan originator (75 percent).

Key Influences on Customer Satisfaction

While nobody in the mortgage industry should be surprised that keeping customers satisfied is critical to building a great business, the numbers in the Mortgage Daily survey stand as an emphatic message to all executives: originators need to work closely with their customers and deliver on their promises. Other people in the firm need to support the originators. There’s no substitute for personal attention and great service.

And yet… the survey also revealed that only 19 percent of firms that conduct customer satisfaction surveys are using that information as part of a producer’s compensation package. In a world in which customers are demanding more and more, origination firms should consider whether they could improve results by adding a customer-service component to financial incentives for their staffs.