It means answering customer questions quickly, in a friendly and knowledgeable manner. It means providing options so the customer can get help through the method of their choosing. It means resolving issues the first time a customer contacts you, whenever possible.
But revolutionary customer service, that’s a different story.
The difference lies in not just meeting customer expectations but designing your entire organizational strategy with the customer in mind. It requires that the full organization functions with a customer service mindset. “Customer Service” needs to be not only a corporate value hung on the wall, but an attitude that lives every day, in every team, throughout the business.
Thinking like a customer means applying empathy throughout the process and giving your team the tools they need to raise the bar on the service they provide. It’s a lot of work and a lot of investment, but it’s worth it in the end.
The result would look something like what we have brewing at Cenlar.
Empower Your People
It starts with empowering your agents, the public face of the organization.
At Cenlar, most of the interactions we have directly with homeowners come through our contact centers. And homeowners are not calling us just to say hello.
They often reach out at what’s a moment of stress for them — a question about their escrow statement, confusion on their 1098, a life change that’s caused them to have difficulty making their payment. Compounding their stress, their issue involves what’s often the biggest single investment of a lifetime, their home.
Even the specter of needing to contact customer support is enough to raise anxiety levels. According to research from customer service platform Zendesk, the majority of consumers feel increasingly stressed and exhausted when needing to deal with customer support. And a survey done by consulting firm PwC showed that only 38% of U.S. consumers say the customer service employees they’ve interacted with understood their needs.
Customers would rather be doing anything else with their time, and they are not getting the empathy they need when they reach out for support. That’s where Cenlar’s CARE program comes in.
In 2024, we introduced the CARE initiative in our contact centers as an insight-driven training program to improve how our front-line team members engage with homeowners. With an overarching goal of connecting with homeowners on a personal level, acknowledging their concerns, relating to their needs and empathizing with their challenges, this combination of technical expertise coupled with a personal touch sets a new standard for what exceptional customer service looks like.
Or, in plain English, our agents are learning that it’s OK to be a human.
Mortgages are inherently complex, involving financial, regulatory and other concerns. Our team members are experts in all of it. But most of the homeowners they speak with aren’t. Homeowners just know they have an issue and need help.
Anyone working with material day-in and day-out will have the tendency to speak on that subject, no matter how complex, as a matter of fact. The result is you wind up speaking to homeowners like they’re an expert, only exacerbating their confusion.
We’re training our agents to make it personal and conversational, as if they’re speaking to a family member who wants to learn more about their mortgage. A good first step is to address the caller by their name. Connect with them. Apologize when the situation calls for it.
To complete this training, we’re providing them with real-life examples of successful calls so our agents can learn together. To reinforce it, we’ve established a peer-to-peer learning program called CARE Ambassadors that empowers top performers to be an example for their colleagues. It focuses on results, identifying opportunities for improvement and allowing Ambassadors to work hand-in-hand with the supervising team. These peer learning sessions not only delve into what makes a successful call but also why, providing greater understanding across the board.
Our agents love it, and there’s a buzz and culture in our contact centers beyond we’ve seen before. Homeowners seem to like it, too, with our customer experience ratings increasing significantly — by 11.4% — since aligning our quality expectations to CARE principles. At the same time, key internal metrics, such as First Call Resolution and Customer Satisfaction, both have trended up, as well.
It makes the future of Cenlar really exciting, as we build on this culture in the coming months. We’ll grow it by giving our agents a suite of new tools that allow them to focus on providing the very best customer service. These tools also happen to be cutting-edge technology that will put Cenlar at the forefront of not just our industry but also of what’s possible when an organization devotes itself to being exceptional for its customers.
But more on that next time.
