Has Digital Use Buoyed Mortgage Customer Satisfaction?

Technology is supposed to make everything better, faster, easier—but what sounds great in theory doesn’t always work out as well in practice. Today the mortgage industry is increasingly embracing the digital, turning to modern technology to help improve and accelerate the mortgage origination process, but a new report from J.D. Power suggests that the new tech isn’t necessarily translating into greater customer satisfaction.

Today J.D. Power released the 2017 U.S. Primary Mortgage Origination Satisfaction Study, which finds that customer satisfaction with mortgage originators has actually declined in 2017. In spite of a significant increase in customers applying online, customers reported the mortgage origination process becoming slower this year, not faster.

According to the report, the average purchasing process took 36 days this year, which is an increase of nearly a week compared to 2016. That drove overall customer satisfaction with mortgage originators down 8 points, based on a 1,000-point scale. That’s in spite of 43 percent of mortgage customers reporting that they applied digitally, which is up from 28 percent in 2016. In spite of this embrace of online application processes, satisfaction among customers applying digitally has dropped by 18 points since the previous year.

Craig Martin, Director of the Mortgage Practice at J.D. Power, said:

We’re at a critical inflection point in the mortgage industry where new technology and the growing use of digital mortgage application channels has made it possible for the origination process to move more quickly; however, the customer is still the final judge of speed and quality. A critical element of satisfaction is setting expectations, and this tends to be a weakness of technology, which is demonstrated by substantially lower satisfaction among customers who do not work with a human to complete their application.

In spite of the surge in online usage, sometimes there’s no replacement for the human touch. J.D. Power’s report cites overall satisfaction among mortgage customers with high levels of trust in their loan representatives at 358 points higher than among those with low levels of trust. So what builds that trust? According to those surveyed, the top three factors are that representatives return calls when they say they’re going to, provide regular status updates, and that customers get to interact with a single representative throughout the process.

Guild Mortgage Company and Quicken Loans both fared well in this survey, tying for a mortgage origination satisfaction score of 878. PrimeLending was close behind with a score of 859.

The 2017 U.S. Primary Mortgage Origination Satisfaction Study uses six factors to track customer satisfaction: application/approval process; interaction; loan closing; loan offerings; onboarding; and problem resolution. This year’s study was conducted in July-August 2017, fielding responses from 5,893 customers who originated a new mortgage or refinanced within the past 12 months.