• Not seeing things from their clients’ point of view

“Next to doing the right thing, the most important thing is to let people know you are doing the right thing.” – John D. Rockefeller

Without a doubt, doing a good job for your clients is an important first step in getting referrals and for some clients, is all you ever have to do. But for the majority of people, good service is what they expect. In fact, a lot of the time your client’s experience of getting a loan with you can often be quite negative due to factors completely outside of your control and due to difficulties with the lender or the client’s lending scenario.

What matters isn’t what happened, what matters is what your client thinks happened.

 

It doesn’t matter that you did a great job getting a loan in a difficult situation if your client doesn’t like that it took a month to get an approval or that the bank valued their home at less than they expected. All of that will reflect back on you if you don’t manage their experience properly.

People often say to me — ‘you have a Psychology degree… what’s that got to do with Mortgage Broking?’

Well, it has everything to do with it because the end value of your service to your clients is whatever they perceive it to be. Perception is everything, and more specifically, their perception is your reality when it comes to future loans and recommendations. You need to manage their experience just as much as you manage their loan to ensure you create a genuine advocate for your business.

 

  • Not frequently and proactively contacting their clients during the loan process

“For every sale you miss because you’re too enthusiastic, you will miss a hundred because you’re not enthusiastic enough.” – Zig Ziglar

Lack of contact is the biggest single factor that will turn your customers off, making them feel like they have been left in the dark and are not important to you. Fortunately, it’s also the one thing you have the most control over.

If you think you are updating them too much, then it’s probably still not enough in their eyes. The worst thing that can happen is that your client isn’t sure of what is going on as they haven’t heard from you in, what they think, is too long.

The best customer service I have experienced is when I was getting constant updates from a settlement agent that I was organising my own purchase through. Every day they were in touch with me. If they sent me something they called to make sure I had received it, to clarify what it was about and if I had any questions. I had to tell them they didn’t need to keep calling me with updates, but the overall message I took away from them was that they really cared about my situation and if a problem happened they would be right onto it, so I felt I was in great hands.

I compare that to a company that was organising a car loan for me. They said they would call me back the next morning. After waiting till early afternoon I had gone elsewhere because I assumed there must be some problem and I just wanted to push ahead and get my new car.