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MortgagePoint » Your Trusted Source for Mortgage Banking and Servicing News 30 September 2024 S P O N S O R E D C O N T E N T preferences, and pain points, and we're being proactive about potential issues rather than waiting for our customers to come to us. These are core principles of customer success. Education Is Key to Customer Success S ervicers have learned that providing relevant, timely education about homeownership for their customers is at least as important as what originators offer during the homebuying journey. During the lifetime relationship with their customers that servicers hope for, there will be many opportunities to guide home- owners through major financial decisions. When their servicer can help them make great refinancing or home equity choices, homeowners are more likely to thrive and return with their business the next time they're looking for guidance. Sagent understands that self-serve education plus smart human advice when needed will lead to better homeowner outcomes—and the results for servicers are fantastic, too. (Many of our customers who make this a priority are, not coinci- dentally, America's leading servicers.) So, of course, we facilitate this education in our consumer platform, CARE, which gives servicers a way to deliver educational content to homeowners on any device, and it will only get better in our next-gen platform, Dara Consumer. But more than that, we recognize that we must also offer education for our customers if they're going to deeply adopt and realize value from our solutions. This means we need to engage with them through every channel possible while de- livering tailored, meaningful content that instantly—you guessed it—creates value. We're serious about this at Sagent, but we also have the most fun with it. IGNITE—our annual user confer- ence—is the biggest example. It's been very successful at offering our customers opportunities to engage with us and each other while building relationships and sustaining clear, two-way communica- tion. It's a truly unique opportunity for our customers, partners, and Sagent em- ployees to be face-to-face and collaborate on the big picture (not to mention have a blast in a spectacular location). But other tactics are just as impactful in different ways. In-person, hands-on training (HOT) instantly boosts our cus- tomers' effectiveness because we cover topics that are relevant to their specific workflow. And we can be sure the topics are relevant because of the relationships we purposefully nurture every single day with the people who are our cus- tomers. Whether it's a 1-on-1 Teams call with their dedicated Customer Success Manager or through fun customer-high- light opportunities like Small Talk Shop (which, if you haven't seen, is a video series I'm proud to say my team pro- duces), we know that, ultimately, we're doing business with humans—not just companies—so when we treat them that way and nurture our relationships, the resulting partnership and collaboration empowers us on our mission of innova- tion, which brings me to my final point. Customer Success Drives Innovation S ervicers have a vested interest in keeping homeowners in their homes. More than just a business model, in many ways their focus on customer delight is the law of the land. An example is the CARES Act, which required servicers and their tech providers to adapt in real time to new ways of assisting customers during a (hopefully) once-a-lifetime pandemic. Some servicing operations had to get creative to meet those deadlines … but from what I see, they've been creative for a while. That's because, without an end-to-end platform to service a loan from onboarding to disposition, they've patched together a constellation of products to get their work done. It's innovative in a sense, but it's not sustainable or repeatable. Sagent enabled our customers to deliver on the CARES Act provisions on day one, and we're proud to have set that precedent. But (see proactive vs. reactive above), we won't settle for building slick compliance solutions just in time; we're out to build the future of servicing. We call it Dara, and it's an industry-first mortgage software platform that unifies all data and user experiences for servicers and homeowners across the entire servicing lifecycle. It's a huge undertaking (there are good reasons no one has tried it before), but we're confident because we have an ace up our sleeves, which you might have guessed: customer success. As a team, Customer Success focuses on ensuring our customers receive the value they expect (and deserve) from our products and services. Our team maintains those relationships, solicits and shares feedback, and gets in the weedy details as customers use our solutions, so we're the first to know when something is hurting their team or their bottom line, and we empathize with their pain. But we don't stop with empathy. We systematically report our intel back into our Product and Technology teams, and it's precisely this direct knowledge of our customers' workflow and deep understanding of their needs because of purposeful listening—our customer- first culture and commitment to their success—that's enabling our larger Sagent team's success on our mission to lead the evolution in loan servicing by solving its most complex challenges. Have you made customer success your superpower? Hit me up and tell me your story. And if you haven't yet, let me know. I have some ideas to share with you. Sagent understands that self-serve education plus smart human advice when needed will lead to better homeowner outcomes—and the results for servicers are fantastic, too.