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20 The Exchange Vanessa Lindow has over 20 years' experience in the real estate industry. Lindow joined Bayview Loan Servicing (now Community Loan Servicing) in February 2008. During her tenure in the mortgage banking industry, she has been responsible for process improvement, customer support, and client relations with various executive leadership titles. Most recently, she held the title of SVP at Community Loan Servicing responsible for several cross functional departments overseeing production and industry compliance of loss mitigation fulfillment retention, government loan servicing, and operations. During her recent conversation with DS News, Lindow spoke about how servicers have adapted to aid borrowers facing economic difficulties, as well as revealing some of her biggest takeaways from the challenges of 2020. How can servicers best assist homeowners who are struggling during this economic downturn? I think that Bayview, along with other servicers, has done a great job of acting swiftly [to adapt to COVID.] rough the utilization and optimization of the IVR (Interactive Voice Response), the website, and other media outlets, we've been able to better communicate with homeowners about their forbearance and post- forbearance options. We best assist homeowners by doing two things: 1) continuing to educate them, and then 2) listening and paying close attention to some of the outliers. In other words, examples of where we should be focused would be the homeowners that were current on March 1 and need payment reduction who are not getting approved for the modification, or the homeowner that thought that he or she had recovered from the pandemic and entered the payment deferral, only, shortly thereafter, to experience another default. ose are some of the things we need to stay focused on and pay close attention to as we continue to embark on this COVID program. What are your biggest takeaways and lessons learned from this challenging year? Two things. e most important is human interaction. We hear that servicers and vendors exceeded expectations at working from home but layering in human interaction—even if just virtually—is important for us to continue to thrive in this environment. Second, know that your team is resilient. While they're not the front line in this pandemic, they understand and are motivated by the fact that they play an important role in keeping families together, eating around the dinner table in their own homes. We take that role seriously, and we have learned to value the role that we play this last year. A version of this interview previously appeared in an episode of DS5: Inside the Industry. "We best assist homeowners by doing two things: 1) continuing to educate them, and then 2) listening and paying close attention to some of the outliers." Vanessa Lindow, Co-CEO/Co-President, Community Loan Servicing Get to Know Industry Executives Beyond the Boardroom