Embrace technology to improve customer experience, brokers tell lenders

Mortgage brokers are urging lenders to use more technology in order to improve customer experience.

This is the message from new research carried out by Capita Mortgage Software Solutions.

The study of mortgage brokers, which comprised survey-based quantitative data and in-depth interviews, found that advisers place significant value on how a lender's system can help them provide a seamless customer experience.

Brokers say the more familiar they are with a lender's system, the more likely they are to be satisfied with it.

Key findings:

- Brokers need systems to ensure they meet the regulatory challenges that have arisen from an increasingly competitive and complex mortgage market

- The vast majority of brokers rated their customer interaction during the application process as highly important - yet they are dependent on mortgage sourcing and application systems for the quality of the customer experience they provide

- Brokers want to concentrate on adding value to the customer by way of providing advice as opposed to ‘form-filling’

- All other things being equal, brokers would place mortgage business with lenders’ whose application systems were the easiest to use, were consistent and which provided the best-case tracking functionality

- Some lenders’ application systems are considered functionally more efficient than others

"Our research suggests that technological developments in legacy mortgage sourcing and application systems have not kept pace with step-change improvements in customer experience elsewhere," says Keith Green, strategic product director at Capita Mortgage Software Solutions.

“Lenders need to use new and emerging technology to appeal to millennials – the next demographic of homeowners. Forward-thinking lenders, willing to embrace technological advances, will thrive if they can harness technology to strengthen customer experience.”