The past twelve months have been difficult for the mortgage industry.   Rates are up, volume is down and compliance is more expensive than ever.   Business is, to say the least, less than awesome.  It’s times like these where a lender services company like ourselves has to really look at our clients — think about their business, consider their struggles and figure out how we can help.

This past spring, our executive team met for approximately 48 hours straight (was it that long? or was it just me?) discussing the state of the market and our true value proposition.  Being the sales and marketing director, I’m challenged every day with communicating a value proposition for every party in the transaction…the lender, the borrower, the real estate agent…but tying that all together is the tough part.  Even within the lender’s office, the CEO, Compliance Officer, Vendor Manager and Branch Manager are all looking for different things from a title company than the Loan Officer might be.  It’s a humbling reality check to examine you corporate value proposition.

The traditional way to go about such an exercise is to identify the need in the market and find a way to fill it. But the key is selling your value proposition internally and making sure each person in the organization believes it and lives it, because without it, you can’t sell in externally.  You can sell a product or a process or an initiative, but when the client buys in your internal team will not be ready and the process will fail. You lose the client, the salesperson blames the operations team and you try a new initiative.

This is when we started looking for awesome.   Around hour 36 of the strategy meetings, our compliance attorney, asked the question- “What do we do well already?”  Of course that made too much sense so we all ignored him.   But then we started thinking- we have almost 8,000 borrower satisfaction reviews that tell us that we do a great job.  We must be doing something right.   Right?

As Oprah would say, here are some things I know for sure:

1. Equity is special. Our people care about each other, our customers and our customers’ customers more than they probably should. We hug a lot, cry, laugh and eat too much cake.  In an industry that’s too often about “what have you done for me lately,” we pride ourselves on being a family.
2. We solve problems for customers every day. There are things we are awesome at- partner relations (aka vendor management), title clearing in 72 hours, post closing QC , innovating new processes that speed up turn around times and improve lender application conversion, the whole cake eating thing…
3. Despite doing everything above, there is one thing in this business that truly matters.  Loans need to close.

If you are like me, and live and breathe this business, you love it when loans close.  When all those hundreds of nit picky items come together and judgment on title is cleared and the borrower’s mother in-law gets out of the hospital, the snowstorm passes and you know that loan is going to close tonight; THAT is awesome.  So to you and me, this might sound crazy, but we have to hear it anyway: the general public doesn’t find loan closings awesome. They liken them to root canals.

Hardly anyone leaves a closing and says “wow, that was awesome.” The closings you hear about are horror stories.  (I once broke a bone during a closing but that’s a blog for another day.)   What if closings could be awesome?   What if we could completely transform the closing process and make it a real celebration?  What if there was cake?   These are the sort of crazy thoughts that came out around hour 44.

There’s another thing I know for sure:   if there is a group of people who could combine a whole bunch of care, compassion, empathy and cake eating with  brilliant, innovative, customer solutions to create an AWESOME closing process for borrowers, sellers, lenders, and real estate agents it is the team at Equity National.

I was told earlier today that the term “customer experience” is dead.  Apparently people are sick of hearing it.  I am done with the word “engagement”, personally, but I am about to use both of them, so I apologize in advance.   Here goes….

Equity National is on a mission to engage and empower our employees and our partners (closing agents and attorneys) to create the absolute ideal customer experience.

Join me as I blog along the way…we are on a mission to awesome!