The real-time pace of change in markets, regulations, and customer expectations has shoved mortgage servicers into the same shifts that originators faced after the 2008 housing crisis. This once rigid, transaction-focused industry has evolved into a dynamic, customer-centric environment where innovation and execution are tightly intertwined. A driving force powering this evolution is technology, and the growing recognition that customer success is not just a department in technology companies delivering for mortgage servicers but a cornerstone of sustainable business growth for both servicers and their technology partners, as well as a reliable asset to a long-lasting partnership.
At Sagent, our vision is only realized when servicers deliver positive homeowner outcomes, which puts our customers’ success at the foundation of our own. As an innovator and technology provider, this means our entire process for delivering technology solutions, from ideation to implementation, must
parallel our own customers’ efforts to improve their operations and equip homeowners for success. Sagent and our customers will both succeed by fostering long-term relationships, anticipating and
preparing for future market cycles, and exceeding homeowner expectations. For all of us, it’s the key difference between a thriving business and one that lives in survival mode (at best).
It’s from this perspective that I’d like to share what we’re learning alongside our customers as they work to deliver positive homeowner outcomes and how that has made customer success at Sagent one of our superpowers as we build a brighter future of servicing.
The Shift From Reactive to Proactive Servicing
Old-school servicing was reactive. Servicers responded to customer inquiries, managed payments, and dealt with delinquencies, moving from process to process with “customer experience” across the lifecycle of a loan barely appearing as a blip on the radar. This approach obviously doesn’t work for today’s
homeowners, who have on-demand requests and expect seamless, personalized experiences. It also doesn’t work for servicers, as it’s made the cost to service a loan extremely high.
Servicers have pivoted remarkably well. Just a few years ago, simple escrow changes would have involved mail-in forms, a physical check, and multiple phone calls or bank trips. And, most dreadful, it would have taken several weeks from start to finish.
I handled paying my most recent escrow change in a few seconds on my phone.
So yes, most servicers are doing much better, and Sagent delivers the technology that enables this experience. But we’re not stopping there, because successful servicers are increasingly shifting their
approach from reactive to proactive.
For servicers, this could mean using predictive analytics to identify homeowners who are at risk of default and don’t even know it, or to identify insurance-cost trends to alert customers to potential cost increases before eventual escrow adjustments. The point is that a proactive approach enables the servicer to deliver a tailored solution for the issue before the customer even knows it exists.
For Sagent, this means building technology that’s scalable for the volumes our customers will manage in a few years, extensible to leverage the latest in emerging AI and other solutions of tomorrow, and easy
for homeowners and servicing operators to understand, navigate, and use. It means understanding
what’s on the regulatory horizon and collaborating with servicers to deliver what they’ll need when new compliance requirements impact their workflow.
In all cases, we’re cultivating a deep understanding of customer needs, preferences, and pain points, and we’re being proactive about potential issues rather than waiting for our customers to come to us. These are core principles of customer success.
Education Is Key to Customer Success
Servicers have learned that providing relevant, timely education about homeownership for their customers is at least as important as what originators offer during the homebuying journey. During the lifetime relationship with their customers that servicers hope for, there will be many opportunities to guide homeowners through major financial decisions. When their servicer can help them make great refinancing or home equity choices, homeowners are more likely to thrive and return with their business the next time they’re looking for guidance.
Sagent understands that self-serve education plus smart human advice when needed will lead to better homeowner outcomes—and the results for servicers are fantastic, too. (Many of our customers who make this a priority are, not coincidentally, America’s leading servicers.) So, of course, we facilitate this education in our consumer platform, CARE, which gives servicers a way to deliver educational content to homeowners on any device, and it will only get better in our next-gen platform, Dara Consumer.
But more than that, we recognize that we must also offer education for our customers if they’re going to deeply adopt and realize value from our solutions. This means we need to engage with them through every channel possible while delivering tailored, meaningful content that instantly—you guessed it—creates value.
We’re serious about this at Sagent, but we also have the most fun with it. IGNITE—our annual user conference—is the biggest example. It’s been very successful at offering our customers opportunities to engage with us and each other while building relationships and sustaining clear, two-way communication.
It’s a truly unique opportunity for our customers, partners, and Sagent employees to be face-to-face and collaborate on the big picture (not to mention have a blast in a spectacular location).
But other tactics are just as impactful in different ways. In-person, hands-on training (HOT) instantly boosts our customers’ effectiveness because we cover topics that are relevant to their specific workflow. And we can be sure the topics are relevant because of the relationships we purposefully nurture every single day with the people who are our customers. Whether it’s a 1-on-1 Teams call with their dedicated Customer Success Manager or through fun customer-highlight opportunities like Small Talk Shop (which, if you haven’t seen, is a video series I’m proud to say my team produces), we know that, ultimately, we’re
doing business with humans—not just companies—so when we treat them that way and nurture our relationships, the resulting partnership and collaboration empowers us on our mission of innovation,
which brings me to my final point.
Customer Success Drives Innovation
Servicers have a vested interest in keeping homeowners in their homes. More than just a business model, in many ways their focus on customer delight is the law of the land. An example is the CARES Act, which required servicers and their tech providers to adapt in real time to new ways of assisting customers during a (hopefully) once-a-lifetime pandemic. Some servicing operations had to get creative to meet those deadlines … but from what I see, they’ve been creative for a while. That’s because, without an
end-to-end platform to service a loan from onboarding to disposition, they’ve patched together a constellation of products to get their work done. It’s innovative in a sense, but it’s not sustainable or repeatable.
Sagent enabled our customers to deliver on the CARES Act provisions on day one, and we’re proud to have set that precedent. But (see proactive vs. reactive above), we won’t settle for building slick
compliance solutions just in time; we’re out to build the future of servicing. We call it Dara, and it’s an industry-first mortgage software platform that unifies all data and user experiences for servicers and
homeowners across the entire servicing lifecycle. It’s a huge undertaking (there are good reasons no one has tried it before), but we’re confident because we have an ace up our sleeves, which you might have
guessed: customer success.
As a team, Customer Success focuses on ensuring our customers receive the value they expect (and deserve) from our products and services. Our team maintains those relationships, solicits and shares
feedback, and gets in the weedy details as customers use our solutions, so we’re the first to know when something is hurting their team or their bottom line, and we empathize with their pain.
But we don’t stop with empathy. We systematically report our intel back into our Product and Technology teams, and it’s precisely this direct knowledge of our customers’ workflow and deep understanding of their needs because of purposeful listening—our customer-first culture and commitment to their
success—that’s enabling our larger Sagent team’s success on our mission to lead the evolution in loan servicing by solving its most complex challenges.
Have you made customer success your superpower? Hit me up and tell me your story. And if you haven’t yet, let me know. I have some ideas to share with you.
