Adviser explains why the pen and paper method is still preferred
While mortgage advisers are increasingly moving on to fully digital platforms, one brokerage says tools such as online forms are often an ineffective way of getting all the information you need from a client - and they may also detract from the overall customer experience.
Commenting on his brokerage’s work process, Nest Home Loans director Jeff Kerwin said that while it has a range of digital tools at the ready, some parts of the home loan process are still best done through meetings, and through notes on pen and paper.
He noted that clients often want as much explanation of the process as possible, and so it is vital to have in-person contact throughout every stage of their journey - particularly at the very beginning.
Read more: Does your brokerage have a ‘repeatable’ online process?
“All of our leads are sent to staff whose role is to gather documents, prepare the clients and prepare the file, and they also spend about an hour with each client educating them on what they can expect for their entire journey with us,” Kerwin said.
“They take them through what a sale purchase is, how to make an offer, all of those kinds of things. We find that our clients are really information hungry, and they want to know all of that stuff, and often nobody is actually sitting down with them to explain everything.”
“When a client hits one of our trigger points - they’ve made an offer, or they’re looking at open homes and they’ve found a house - anything where the transaction is looking likely to go ahead, that’ll get packaged up and handed over to a broker,” Kerwin explained.
“That broker will then do a fact find, and a virtual assistant can put together an application from the tick box template and the templates that we have loaded into our CRM. It’s all template and work-flow driven, and VAs often do a lot of the work behind the scenes.”
While the brokerage has made use of an array of digital tools, Kerwin said it decided against having an online application process for clients, due to a number of reasons.
“We decided not to go ahead with sending out online applications, so we always do a face-to-face meeting either digitally or in person,” he said.
Read more: Global Finance launches personalised mortgage support plan
“We always do the fact-find written on paper. The reason for that is that we can write down a lot more information through a verbal conversation, rather than just sending out a link.”
“The other problem with online applications is that clients often don’t know how to answer a lot of the questions,” he added.
“For example, for ‘what is your income?’, they can put any old number in there which isn’t really what we’re after. We’d have to re-interview them afterwards anyway to get the right answer.
“I’m not a big fan of simply sending out an online application form, and I think it’s a better customer experience if we’re going through that with them verbally.”
