Firestarter
Kyle Clark
Marketing Director at Intercap Lending
I think Intercap is just the bee’s knees! We have incredible leaders here who make some very, very strategic and educated moves, so we’re ready to rock and roll before, during, and after market downturns. In fact, right now, we have about 200 loan officers—which is already pretty awesome—but we’re actually expanding, which is super-crazy to say in this market.
We have offices across most of the Western States, plus an office in Oklahoma. Our mighty Marketing team of seven people is based out of the corporate office in Salt Lake City, Utah. So, we have the sales force, we have the backing, and we have everything else to really excel and succeed.
As marketing director, I oversee Intercap Lending’s technology implementations, marketing strategies, marketing system engagement, training, campaign tracking, cross-team functionality, and everything in between. I’m kind of a jack-of-all trades, and Total Expert is one of the awesome systems I manage and maintain.
Integrated marketing ecosystem powers a “Wheel of awesomeness”
Total Expert is like our Holy Grail here at Intercap. At its teeny, tiniest core, Total Expert is our go-to CRM. You can create a lead. You can see where that lead came from. You can schedule a follow-up task. You can make a note when you have a conversation with them.
But Total Expert also does so much more. We can utilize Total Expert’s Journeys and intelligent, automated communications to send the right message to the right person at the right time. No matter where they are in the homeowner lifecycle, what we send is exactly what they need right when they need it, which is awesome.
Plus, I can work with our loan officers to find out what’s happening, where the pain points are in the field, or where people wish we had better communications or functionality. And I can build solutions for them.
It’s just so easy having everything under one, Total Expert-powered roof.
Smart integrations unify a range of data and capabilities
So far, we’ve completely integrated six different technology systems with Total Expert— Encompass, SimpleNexus/Ncino Mortgage, Homebot, Optimal Blue, MBS Highway, and Microsoft Outlook. We call this Total Expert-powered ecosystem our “little Wheel of Awesomeness” because everything flows together so seamlessly.
Without these integrations, we’d just have six different marketing systems functioning independently of one another. But, by combining those systems with Total Expert, we have this entire Wheel of Awesomeness—both technology and moments in the homeowner lifecycle.
Intelligent automation makes work easier
A lot of times, people don’t realize what’s happening behind the scenes. They don’t know about all the different technological pieces that are in place to simplify, streamline, and enhance their day-to-day loan officer activities—making phone calls, doing the grind, closing sales, completing their fiduciary duties—all that stuff.
There’s this incredible, automated tech stack supporting them every step of the way. With it, everything happens all at once, without our people having to do too much manually.
Using peer training, customer intelligence, and platform access to inspire user adoption
When we first started with Total Expert, even though Marketing was working hard to train loan officers to log in to Total Expert every single day, a lot of them were stuck in their old ways of doing things—like tracking their day-to-day activities on Excel spreadsheets and Google Docs. So, we ended up developing a five-month training series where peers taught peers about Total Expert. And that worked much better for us. We actually had students tell us after the training that they had no idea they could use Total Expert exactly like they were using a spreadsheet, but then also do so much more with it.
But even when more loan officers began using Total Expert, a lot of them still weren’t completing the necessary tasks to make the messages Total Expert sends as compelling and relevant as possible. Combine that issue with the fact that our leads essentially die after just five days of inactivity, and we knew we had a big problem. So, we decided to add Total Expert’s Customer Intelligence module to our implementation and use exact replicas of all the different insight Journeys we already had because those are the ones that generate the hottest leads for us.
How we have it set up now, with Customer Intelligence, is that our hot leads receive 1-2 points of automated communication—emails, text messages, whatever—then Total Expert assigns a task to the loan officer. If they do nothing with it—take no action or send no communications—within a certain amount of time, we pass the lead on to our Consumer Direct team.
So basically, we tell loan officers that somebody will steal your lunch if you don’t do your job. I know that’s a little bit of tough love. But our goal is to be able to tell our leaders, “Hey, we’ve had Customer Intelligence turned on for X amount of time, and X people haven’t really utilized it, completed their assigned tasks, or let the Journeys function as needed. And here’s the amount of money that’s leaving on the table.” Then, our leaders have the data points they need to help us fix the problem.
Another thing we’ve done to encourage as many loan officers as possible to use Total Expert is to give them free access to the entire platform and all integrations. That’s become an actual selling point for our executives when meeting with a new recruit since a lot of companies only give bare-minimum access to Total Expert to their field teams. If you’re a loan officer at one of those companies, if you want more marketing automation or CRM capabilities, you have to pay insane amounts of money for it yourself.
So, when people hear we give everyone in the field free access to the entire Total Expert platform, a lot of them are like, “Whoa! No way! Of course, I want to sign up with you guys!”
Success means bringing more loans through the door
We measure our sales and marketing success according to the number of loans coming in the door. So, whatever we can do to keep loans coming in the door, keep everybody happy, and keep business growing, our leaders are game for it.
And ever since adding Total Expert Customer Intelligence to our ecosystem, we’ve definitely seen an uptick in our business. Especially in the number of new people shopping for mortgages, who we learn about because Customer Intelligence alerts our loan officers when they have their credit pulled. The people themselves are calling more now, too—our loan officers’ phones are actually ringing more because of Customer Intelligence, which is pretty cool. So that one’s been huge for us.
Of course, the home listing alerts from Customer Intelligence have also been huge. For those leads, we train loan officers that they aren’t just opportunities to reach out and congratulate people in the hopes of picking them up as a buyer. It’s about reaching out to the entire spectrum of people involved in the home sale. So, reach out to the listing agent and offer them something they value, like the use of a full marketing suite. You can say, “Hey, I can get you signed up on Total Expert and get you open house lead capture apps. I can get you marketing materials. I can create a custom website for you.” We’ve found that making that kind of offer really opens the floodgates.
Plus, by using Total Expert Customer Intelligence, we’ve completely resolved some of the biggest pain points we had with our last customer engagement platform as far as measuring ROI. They’d basically just compare “applications received” to “applications funded” during the same timeframe to try to show ROI.
But with Total Expert, we have an analytics dashboard that shows us up-to-date results. And as I tell our executive team—whether or not Total Expert directly leads to an individual taking a loan with us, it definitely contributes to it at one or more points during the lead lifecycle.
Superior customer service also sets Total Expert apart
The communication, support, and backing we receive from Total Expert is nothing short of amazing.
When somebody responds to our inquiry, it’s an actual person, not a robot. I never feel like a nuisance. Everything—everybody—at Total Expert from the top down has just been incredible. And twice now, their fantastic conferences have actually inspired us to throw similar events and piggyback certain ideas.
If it’s not clear by now, we’ve been very, very happy with Total Expert.
What’s next?
With today’s super-volatile market, everybody at Intercap is hyper-focused on looking at everything through a magnifying glass. And even though Total Expert has some really great features, we also see some holes that need filling. Our adoption isn’t where we want it yet. And our contract renews this year.
We *have* explored what else is out there. But what we’ve found is that none of the other options can do what Total Expert can do. And none can compete with what Total Expert already has.
And as far as those holes go, our awesome CSM told us Total Expert is actually beta testing an enhancement that fills one of them, and the product roadmap will likely fill the others. We can’t wait!