We have all spent time waiting for someone to answer our customer service call.
At Cenlar, we cannot give you back any of those minutes. But we are working hard to deliver the very best experience to homeowners, each and every day. And that starts with the acknowledgement that your time is precious.
It’s at the heart of how we care for homeowners, and the results speak for themselves. In a business where success is measured in seconds, we’ve been shaving minutes off the average customer service response time for our industry.
Just look at data from the Mortgage Bankers Association, which regularly surveys servicing companies as to both the quality and speed of response to customer inquiries. In April 2022, we beat the industry benchmark. The average homeowner waited only 30 seconds for a call to Cenlar to be answered, almost two full minutes faster than the industry average. What’s more, we continue to outpace the industry average. From that point through August 2022, we continue to surpass the benchmark and expect to continue to perform well on an ongoing basis.
That’s remarkable in a post-pandemic era where every business has had to manage a range of customer service challenges. It’s especially true in our industry, with the last few years introducing whole new levels of complexity and urgency to the mortgage servicing business.
To keep American families in their homes, the federal government and many state governments introduced forbearance and loan forgiveness programs that needed to be administered immediately. Dramatically lowered interest rates brought a tidal wave of mortgage refinancing.
This wave of change challenged an industry already highly regulated.
But, at Cenlar, we know we have a driving obligation to each and every homeowner. That obligation cannot be forgotten or understated.
That’s why our commitment to always seeking ways to continue to provide the best customer service and making investments in both people and technologies to carry that objective, are an ongoing mission reinforced daily at every level of Cenlar.
As the MBA data showed, it indicates our commitment that is measurable against our peers.
Cenlar improved on the average time to reach resolution of homeowner queries. Rather than an accident or statistical blip, these numbers reflect both substantial investments and the strengthening of the Cenlar commitment to “think like a homeowner.”
We have been able to retain a core, dedicated group of servicing professionals, while dramatically improving both hiring and training practices. That means that when a call comes to us, it is more quickly resolved by a professional with the ability to handle issues at different levels of complexity. We are able to both pick up the phone more quickly and reach a resolution more quickly.
Our telephony investments in people and technologies like artificial intelligence are also key to ongoing progress. We have an average of 145,000 bot interactions with homeowners each month, with approximately 80% no longer needing to speak with a live representative.
We’ve also made dramatic progress by resolving homeowner issues before they ever pick up the phone. The new Cenlar website, introduced about a year ago, has significantly upgraded the information and ease of use for homeowners who have grown accustomed to seeking answers online.
It is important to us that we be better than most in our industry in any given month. It is even more important that we are better than we were the month before, no matter how anyone else is doing.
Committed to Driving Customer Service Success
