The mortgage sales process has never been straightforward and in the current market it seems as if more and more obstacles are being placed in an adviser’s path. New regulations, government mortgage initiatives and a housing market where stock is so low that talk of gazumping is back in the media are all forming part of the current mortgage landscape.
Competition for clients (and mortgage deals) is rife and so when an adviser is approached by a client there is an increasing pressure to ensure that a sale is completed.
For many advisers that I speak with, one of the major issues contributing to a failed sale is often when the process is interrupted. This can be for many reasons but the result is often the same. When potential customers are required to wait for documentation, or send in evidence and approval the sale can enter a black hole never to be seen again.
Additionally, during any break in a sale the potential client is subjected to myriad distractive forces whether this is an alternative broker, an advert in a branch, internet research or the chap in the pub that knows everything about mortgages and definitely the one that you should go for.
The most common breaks in the mortgage process come from the need to physically produce and exchange documentation. We are all familiar with the documents that need to be produced in a set order to be able to progress a mortgage application and for many brokers a very successful initial meeting can be usurped by the delay caused in sending the relevant documents to a client to complete and return. I’m not sure what your local mail deliveries are like but it is certainly not uncommon for it to take three or four days for a package to arrive.
This then sits on the mat or hall table for a while until the recipient gets around to dealing with it. With application forms especially, as filing them out can be quite onerous, the task often falls behind other priorities. This type of delay opens the opportunity for other influencing factors. Additionally this type of delay can sabotage the entire application if a particular rate, or more typically, favourable underwriting conditions change.
Every time a break is introduced the number of client conversions drop away regardless of whether the initial contact was by face-to-face or over the phone, so the need to make it a continuous process can’t be over emphasised.
If you’ll indulge me a slight aside into another area of financial services, the process in credit cards shares many of the same issues. Potential customers make a call to an agent and then an application form is sent out in the post for the customer to sign and return. Statistics show that this break in the sales process results in a 40% (yes, forty per cent!) drop off rate.
Those customers who did wait patiently for the form and returned it then had to wait for their application to be received by the bank. It was only then that they would dispatch the new credit card and this entire process took on an astonishing three to five weeks to complete.
Consider the size of many telephone teams in finance services firms and it’s easy to see how delays and lost opportunities are affecting hundreds of advisers and thousands of customers.
There are many benefits to using screen sharing solutions such as improved compliance but this most simple of things, the ability to share and sign documents without delay, is enough to make a significant change to a firm with a remote sales team.
