Service review

Service is still the key

Bob Hunt

Board member of Society of Mortgage Professionals and chief executive of Paradigm Mortgage Services

There are few things as prized in our market as service excellence. As you will have heard countless times before, building a strong reputation for this can take a very long time – and be destroyed in a matter of moments.

In the current market – regardless of what type of stakeholder you are – service seems like the most important aspect of our business offerings. However, as we are all too acutely aware, just because we might be on top of our game in terms of our client-facing duties, that doesn’t mean the overall experience will be of the highest standards.

That, of course, is an issue, but it’s not one we are ever going to get over. The fact is that you are reliant on others to bring a case home to completion, and you will have to put your faith in those others at various crucial points of the customer journey.

Of course, the choice of who you deal with is vitally important in that regard. In a very real way, you will be judged by the company you keep; it’s a very good reason why, when the original regulatory rules for the mortgage market were being considered and consulted on, our ‘founding fathers’ wanted to ensure a choice made on price alone wouldn’t override everything else when an adviser was weighing up a recommendation. Praise be for that.

At present, being able to choose based on service – particularly lender service – seems to be absolutely vital. The adviser community does not need me to tell them what is happening right now in our marketplace; they deal with it every single day – and in some cases, it’s not pretty.

It has struck me lately that too many have taken their eyes off the ball when it comes to delivering service excellence. This is despite the fact that service is the only sustainable competitive advantage to be secured in an ultra-competitive market in which, for example, there are only so many levers to pull to bring in business.

For instance – and this is as relevant to advisers as it is to distributors like us and to lenders – you might ‘innovate’, but that innovation will tend, at some stage in the future, to be copied. As an example, at Paradigm, we began to innovate in terms of how we rewarded member firms through a profit share and rebate, knowing it was going to be only a matter of time before others did their best to follow the model.

Price is clearly also a major lever available to businesses; you can lower yours, you can chase it to the bottom and try to bring in business this way, but ultimately it’s likely there will always be someone who can say they are going to provide what you do for less. Some are big enough to be able to make their product a loss leader. How low can you go – and for how long – before that just isn’t sustainable?

Or you can look at differentiation via service – reliable, consistent, time-conscious, value-adding service and support that delivers exactly what it says it will, within the required time. That’s essentially what I’ve always tried to do, as I’ve also tried to make sure the business stands out for delivering this.

This is a real strategy, one that recognises the importance of service to your customers – in our case, advisers; recognises their needs, recognises how their reputations can be affected, and recognises (and seeks to help them keep) the promises that they have made to their customers. It’s no different if you are a lender or surveyor or conveyancer – the process is the same.

Looking around the marketplace at the moment, do enough businesses that we all rely upon have service excellence anywhere near the top of their list of priorities?

Dare I say it? Perhaps some of the leaders in our mortgage market need to take a metaphorical helicopter ride and survey their own businesses. Looking down at what they are offering, they can then ask themselves, “Is this really the best we can do?”

Perhaps it’s really a case of going back to basics for them. If they need a place to start, the age-old “Would it be good enough for my mum?” test will immediately tell them whether they are on anywhere near the right path, let alone walking along it. Would the service we offer satisfy her?

An honest answer to that playingfield leveller of a question will at least get them to begin working through why they might be in their current position, where the specific problems are, and how the business can get out of any hole it might find itself in.

And the benefit of this? Well, you can guarantee that not all competitors will be willing or able to look this honestly at their current service offering. They might not see the value in doing this, or of changing anything, preferring to muddle along, perhaps trying to solve it by ‘innovating’ or ‘repricing’ to get themselves out of a hole – only to find weeks/months later that they are still in it, and perhaps even deeper.

There is undoubtedly real value to be had in delivering on service. Customers will appreciate it, and it is fundamentally the only longterm sustainable plan to ensure your business remains competitive. M I