The pandemic had negatively impacted several industries, but the #mortgage industry certainly wasn’t one. This industry had a turtle start in 2020 but picked up the pace by the end of the year.
Also, the mortgage industry in the US is one of the world’s largest, and mortgage debt is the main source of all the debts held by Americans. The mortgage debt in the US was valued at around $1.76 trillion in 2021.
But along with this enormous growth, consumer preferences also started shifting, which started worrying many lenders.
Shifting consumer preferences in the mortgage industry
A BIG problem in the mortgage industry was the extremely slow process; most modern-day customers wanted speed. The lending and borrowing process involves a lot of documentation and data collection, which takes time. To make matters worse, most of the data are unstructured and unverified. Owing to the massive number of customers applying for a mortgage, some approvals can take even 2 months. Studies show that the satisfaction dropped by 15 percentage points if the lender took more than 10 days to decide on the application.
Customers also craved simplicity in the overall process. They did not want to spend hours finding unknown information and filling up the form manually.
Such plaguing issues pulled back the mortgage industry as many lenders couldn’t convert the prospects just because the process was tedious and time-consuming, leaving open a massive gap in the borrower’s journey.
This led to the rapid adoption of intelligent #automation and #DigitalCustomerExperience in the industry to improve customer satisfaction.
How does intelligent automation improve customer satisfaction?
Here are some popular technologies that have boosted the efficiency of the lenders and improved overall customer happiness –
Intelligent Document Processing
Some lenders used OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology to process data faster. To the uninitiated, OCR is the process of converting images(handwritten or printed) text into machine-encoded texts. But having only OCR in their arsenal meant a lot of human intervention.
The shortcomings in OCR led to the growth of Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) that used Artificial Intelligence. It handles multiple types of documents, both unstructured and structured. IDP also delivers greater document processing accuracy, thus reducing errors and time. It aids in extracting, classifying, and validating users’ critical data to approve or decline their loan applications.
How it positively impacts customer satisfaction: Accurate application processing means lesser rejections due to human errors, more #reliability, and happier customers.
Natural Language Processing (NLP)
NLP is a branch of artificial intelligence that enables computers to understand human language and respond accordingly. There are multiple use cases of NLP in the mortgage industry. For instance, it helps lenders’ legal teams to search and review large volumes of legal documents in a very short time. It can also extract key data and clauses to help lenders review the mortgage agreements. Another popular use case is chatbots. Customers need not wait in queues to get answers to simple questions as NLP-powered chatbots can answer them anytime, anywhere.
How it positively impacts customer satisfaction: Improved #responsiveness to customer queries means customers are never in the dark during their journey.
Robotic Process Automation
Using Robotic Process Automation (RPA), low-level, repetitive tasks can be easily automated, which can reduce human errors. It will help lenders onboard customers more efficiently. RPA has also been helping against fraud detection, anti-money laundering efforts, and loan processing. Lastly, RPA frees up underwriters’ time and produces accurate reports by collecting and processing data related to mortgage applicants.
How it positively impacts customer satisfaction: Faster onboarding process means loans are made available instantly to the borrowers.
Conclusion
Intelligent process automation(#IPA) can help lenders provide top notch customer support by removing all the bottlenecks produced by the traditional process. #Earlyadopters have already improved the speed of the overall mortgage process, thereby improving customer satisfaction. Looking at the benefits of intelligent automation, all lenders should try to become the #frontrunners in the race to adopt intelligent automation; it will be a potential solution for all their financial, operational, and regulatory challenges impacting customer satisfaction levels in the coming days.
