Gemma Atkin (pictured), head of telephony at NatWest, said that the bank had “somebody to help the broker at every stage of the customer’s home buying journey”, whether that was pre- or post-submission, and a technical team to help with enquiries.

She said the support team consisted of around 100 colleagues across its phone lines, with around 50 colleagues on pre- and post-submission enquiries, supporting intermediaries.

“Brokers told us they wanted a quick answer, and experts who can take ownership to help them at every stage of the mortgage journey. We’ve worked hard to create this experience via the phone, live chat and our digital channels,” Atkin added.

She said that its live chat facility is manned by its business development team, the members of which are “experts in process and policy” who work across phones and live chat. Atkin said this means “we can move colleagues between our phone lines and live chat depending on demand and be ready for where and when brokers need us”.

She said that around 55% of brokers choose to digitally transact pre-submission and contacted the lender through live chat.

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“Since we made our structural changes last May, we’ve seen more brokers having trust in using our live chat facility. Our new business development team are brilliantly trained on both systems (live chat and taking telephone enquiries). We’ve spent a lot of time letting brokers know our live talk team are real people, as brokers are now starting to see the same names come up on there and on the phone,” she said.

 

NatWest website update to further improve broker experience

Atkin added that NatWest had made significant investment in its websites “to make the guidance and policy examples better” and had introduced hubs to “help a broker on the journey of taking a customer through our home buying experience to make it really easy and simple.”

She added: “It’s all about ensuring brokers have the information they need up front, whether they choose to call us, live chat with us or look at our website.”

When asked what qualities the firm looked for in team members who support intermediaries, Atkin said it would be “somebody that’s adaptable, somebody that understands the broker and their needs as well as the mortgage journey. It’s important they can help our brokers and give an extremely good experience; we can train our business development team on NatWest’s policy and process, and we’ve got a brilliant leadership team to support them.”

 

NatWest testing post-submission live chat

When asked about new developments, Atkin said that it is currently testing live chat for post-submission queries, following broker feedback.

“At the moment, we’re testing how we can make that work and get that balance with our brokers to really help them at pre- and post-submission. We know more brokers prefer to use live chat than call us, so if we can expand our service options to brokers at post-submission, that’s what we’d love to do.

“In the future, we’d like the broker to have even more choice on how they get the answer they need pre- and post-submission.

“We know that some brokers aren’t able to call us as they might have a customer on the phone and actually need to be live chatting to us whilst they’re talking to a customer. We want to make it really easy for brokers to transact in any way they want to with us, and we’ve got the experts ready to help them.”

Atkin’s key message to brokers was: “We’re here to help you. We’re the experts that you need us to be. Keep using us. Or try us, if you haven’t used us for a while.”

 

Gemma has been at NatWest for 20 years working in a variety of retail and leadership roles, with her main focus being on mortgages and mortgage advice for over 15 years. She joined the intermediary mortgage business in 2023, where she’s responsible for NatWest’s intermediary contact centres.

This part of a series of interviews with senior executives at NatWest. Read our interviews with Mark Bullard and Brad Fordham.