Key Takeaways from the Financial Brand’s Forum Conference: Put Humanity Back in Banking

Smart routing, contact-centric pipeline management, Journey automation, and real-time pipeline visibility have always been the core of Lead Management. But top-performing originators and strategic sales leaders told us they needed more if they were going to stay one step ahead in the current market. They asked; we delivered.  

Here's what's new in Lead Management.

So, an LOS and a sales pipeline walk into a bar...

Until now, keeping lead stages accurate required manual effort. When a loan moved forward in the LOS, someone had to remember to update the record in Total Expert. That gap between what was happening in the LOS and what the pipeline showed was friction nobody needed—and an opportunity to create confusion among lending teams.

Now, those updates are fully automated. When a loan status changes in your connected LOS, the corresponding lead stage advances in Total Expert. No more manual updates, no more room for error, and your pipeline view stays accurate at all times, so your team spends less time syncing data and more time working deals.

Tap into Lead Management from anywhere, on any device

Lead Management is now available in the Total Expert Mobile App!

Originators can view their leads, create new ones, and log notes and outcomes in Total Expert directly from their phone. Whether they're at a real estate agent’s office, a networking event, or just away from their desk, they have full access to the information they need to follow up fast. Speed to lead is critical, and Total Expert is here to help you outpace the competition.

Journeys that don't make you backtrack

As borrowers progress through automated Journey workflows (opening emails, responding to texts, talking to AI Sales Assistants, and completing key actions), your pipeline can advance right along with them. With a few tweaks in Journey Builder, you can update lead stages automatically to reduce manual entry and increase pipeline data accuracy.

Whose lead is it anyway?

One of the most disruptive things a lead routing system can do is reassign a lead that has already engaged with another originator. But if an owned contact re-enters the system with a different number or email, they might get sent back into the distribution queue instead of connected with the last originator they engaged with.

Lead Management significantly reduces that risk. Admins can configure routing policies to bypass distribution entirely when an incoming lead matches a contact already owned by an originator. That way, relationships stay intact, and your team avoids those awkward conversations about who actually owns the opportunity.

Cleaner data, better integrations, more doing what you do best

Lead records now include UTM parameters and additional standard fields, which means better source tracking and more consistent reporting. If you're trying to understand which campaigns, channels, or partners are generating your best leads, this data will give you more to work with.

And for teams using AI Sales Assistant or third-party dialers: lead details like loan purpose, property information, and lead ID can now be included in Outbound Data Connector payloads to give your external tools the context they need to make an impact from the very first touchpoint.

Fully loaded Lead Management

Total Expert Lead Management is built to help turn more opportunities into revenue by assigning leads faster, automating engagements and follow-ups, and giving sales leaders better visibility into what’s working and where the gaps are.  

Ready to see it in action? Schedule a demo or reach out to your Customer Success Manager for more info!

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**This content was originally published on Housingwire.com**

In this conversation with HousingWire’s Allison LaForgia, Total Expert Founder & CEO Joe Welu outlined how the company’s evolution to Customer IQ is reshaping the way lenders engage borrowers and drive growth.

"We just announced Customer IQ as this next evolution of our platform,” Welu said. “Taking what we built with Customer Intelligence . . . and we’ve reimagined it for the AI revolution, what we call this 'agentic lending opportunity.'"

At the core of that evolution is a system designed to unify and interpret data in real time. “Customer IQ aggregates all of the different data points and interprets what those data points mean . . . what’s going on in my customer’s life at this moment that I can connect with them on and provide value to them,” he explained.

To bring that concept into focus, Welu pointed to a common borrower scenario: “Maybe they had some medical issues, maybe they had some unnecessary expenses, but it’s clear from what’s happening on their credit report that they have a spiking, revolving debt. Customer IQ knows that you’ve got three, four hundred thousand in equity in your home.”

From there, that insight doesn’t sit idle. It becomes actionable through AI-driven engagement. “Customer IQ brings all that together, and then it puts it into our agentic layer, which ultimately is AI agents that can go out and have a conversation, send a text, a voice call, and then bring the loan officer into the loop.”

The result is a clear shift from traditional workflows. “If you think about a loan officer historically, they would be going through their database at random… [now] the AI agent will bring them into the loop,” Welu said.

When it comes to measurable impact, Welu didn’t hesitate. “It’s hard to overstate how extraordinary some of the results that we’re seeing are,” he said. “We’ve seen people increase the applications… three to four times more loan applications than if they just use the humans.”

That scale is driven by a simple shift in capacity.  “You’re limited on how many of those people you can talk to… now I can go out, talk to thousands and thousands of people… and put time on the calendar for that loan officer.”

In practice, that translates directly into day-to-day execution.“We had a top producer… they had 26 appointments over two days… with people that are ready to talk about how you can help them.”

But the opportunity extends beyond volume alone. Welu emphasized a broader strategic shift toward deeper customer relationships. “The most profitable way to grow their organization and build a sustainable lender in 2026 and beyond, is to go really deep with your customers, get loyalty…the limiting factor to doing that was ultimately, day-to-day human behavior,” he said.

AI changes that equation. “If you can just augment their skills… with the most brilliant, intelligent assistant you’ve ever imagined, it’s a recipe that opens up this new world of possibilities.”

Central to that “recipe” is context. “It’s that system of context that can aggregate everything… interpret it, prioritize it, and then ultimately feed that into my human loan officers and the AI agents,” Welu said.

That precision leads directly to better outcomes. “ You end up with a customer that feels like you deeply understand them,” he noted.

Compared to prior waves of AI, Welu sees this moment as fundamentally different. “Most of the AI was very incremental… this is helping you go deeper with customers and ultimately create loans and new revenue. The ROI is nearly immediate.”

Looking ahead, Total Expert is moving quickly to build on that momentum. “We’ve taken a more extreme and aggressive approach to innovating and moving quickly… it’s just what’s required to win in 2026,” he said.

What’s next includes new capabilities already in development. “We’re releasing… our next AI agent… a refi agent, which helps you go in and analyze your portfolio, create scenarios and just do some really cool things,” Welu shared.For Welu, the mission remains simple: “How do we partner and help our customers win at the very highest level, period, full stop.”

Meet the Partner: Birdeye

Birdeye is the #1 Agentic Marketing Platform for multi-location brands. Financial institutions use Birdeye to manage their online presence, collect and respond to customer reviews, monitor local listings, and turn customer feedback into actionable growth intelligence. Birdeye’s platform unifies the marketing stack to help lenders, banks, and credit unions build trust at scale—branch by branch, advisor by advisor—so every part of the organization is earning customer confidence before, during, and after the relationship begins.

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For most financial institutions, the customer relationship begins when someone fills out an application, walks into a branch, or picks up the phone. But that’s not when your customer’s journey begins.

Long before a borrower reaches out, they’ve already started forming an opinion about you, your competitors, realtors, and the mortgage industry in general. They’ve searched for lenders in their area, read reviews, seen the news, and talked to family, friends, and coworkers. They’ve probably even asked Claude or ChatGPT to compare rates from local banks and credit unions. They’ve scanned branch listings, looked at star ratings, and made a shortlist of their top choices. They’ve done a lot. And all without ever speaking to a single person on your team.

That’s the new front door for financial services. And for too many institutions, that front door is invisible, inconsistent, or completely closed. It’s a huge problem that Total Expert and Birdeye are working together to solve.

The shift happening right now in borrower discovery

Borrower behavior has changed in ways that most financial institutions haven’t fully caught up with yet. For a long time, reputations in financial services were built through branch relationships, local presence, referrals, and personal trust. Those things still matter but, today, trust is often built or lost before a borrower ever speaks to a loan officer, banker, or advisor.

A borrower may first meet your brand through a Google search, an online review, a branch listing, a social post, or an AI-generated answer. They may ask AI platforms which lender is best for first-time homebuyers, which credit union has the best service, or which local bank is easiest to work with. In that moment, your reputation isn’t just what your brand says. It’s what the digital ecosystem can find, understand, and validate about you.

The data backs this up. Birdeye’s State of Online Reviews 2026 report found that review volume grew 30.7% year over year in 2025, with Google capturing nearly 80% of all reviews. Meanwhile, McKinsey describes AI-powered search as the “new front door to the internet,” with research showing that half of consumers already use AI-powered search and that AI search could influence $750 billion in revenue by 2028.

For financial institutions, this matters because trust is a product you can’t put a price on. People are making decisions about homes, savings, credit, and their financial future. If your branch information is inaccurate, your reviews are negative or outdated, or customer feedback goes unanswered; you may lose the borrower before the relationship even starts.

What Birdeye does and why it matters for financial institutions

Birdeye replaces fragmented point tools with one full-cycle platform. Instead of forcing small teams to manually update data, custom AI agents execute marketing playbooks autonomously across hundreds of locations. For financial institutions, it helps manage the full digital presence of every branch, advisor, and location—at scale.

In practical terms, that means:

• Keeping branch and location data accurate and consistent across every major listing platform and search engine

• Collecting customer feedback and reviews at key moments in the borrower journey

• Monitoring and responding to reviews across Google and other platforms—quickly and at scale

• Surfacing customer experience signals by branch, loan officer, product line, or market so teams can identify where trust is strong and where it’s breaking down

• Building the content, consistency, and credibility signals that AI-driven answer engines use to recommend businesses to consumers

Birdeye’s State of AI Search 2026 report found that in an analysis of ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, 80% of brands were cited at least once in AI-generated answers—but only 15% held the top citation position with their own owned domain. AI search rewards clarity, structure, and consistency. The financial institutions that win in AI-driven discovery will be the ones with the most trusted, complete, and credible local footprint.

That’s exactly what Birdeye is built to create.

How Total Expert and Birdeye work together

Most financial institutions don’t have a data problem. They have a connection problem.

Customer signals are everywhere: CRM records, reviews, surveys, branch interactions, loan officer conversations, and servicing feedback. The issue is that these signals often sit in separate systems. So, by the time a team sees the pattern, the moment to act has already passed.

Total Expert helps financial institutions manage customer engagement and relationship journeys. Birdeye helps them capture feedback, manage reputation, improve local visibility, and turn customer signals into action. Together, they connect the relationship layer with the reputation and experience layer—so the intelligence flows in both directions.

Here’s how the integration works in practice:

• Lenders can request feedback from borrowers at important moments in the relationship journey—after an application, closing, branch visit, or servicing interaction

• Survey responses and customer experience scores from Birdeye can flow back into Total Expert, giving relationship teams visibility into how borrowers are feeling inside the systems they already use every day

• A positive review can strengthen local visibility and reinforce trust in that branch or advisor’s digital presence

• A negative review or recurring complaint can trigger service recovery or escalation—before it becomes a bigger problem

• Patterns in feedback data can become operational priorities, helping regional or branch leaders identify where the experience is breaking down and course-correct quickly
  

This is the shift financial institutions need to make: feedback shouldn’t sit in a dashboard. It should move into the daily workflow of the business.

From reactive to proactive: the future of experience-driven growth

The traditional model of reputation management was reactive. A customer leaves a review. Someone responds. A report gets created. Maybe a trend reaches leadership weeks later.

That model is too slow for how borrowers make decisions today.

PwC’s 2025 Customer Experience Survey found that 52% of consumers stopped using or buying from a brand after a bad product or service experience, and 29% stopped because of poor customer experience online or in person. Experience isn’t a soft metric. It directly affects loyalty and growth.

Together, Total Expert and Birdeye give financial institutions the tools to move earlier and act faster. AI can help teams listen at scale—bringing together signals from reviews, surveys, social channels, listings, and CRM systems. It can help teams act faster by identifying urgent issues, drafting responses, routing follow-ups, and giving branch and regional leaders clear next steps. And it can help leaders see what’s working: which branches are earning the strongest trust, which loan officers are creating the best borrower experience, and which themes are driving referrals and conversion.

This is where reputation management becomes something bigger: experience-driven growth.

Accessible through the Expert Partner Network

For Total Expert customers, accessing Birdeye is straightforward through the Expert Partner Network—the same ecosystem where lenders can access a range of integrated tools and services designed to support every stage of the borrower journey.

Instead of standing up a new workflow or managing a separate vendor relationship, Birdeye’s capabilities become part of how your team already operates. The feedback loop between Birdeye and Total Expert means your relationship data gets smarter over time, your team sees the signals they need in the right context, and your borrowers experience a more consistent, responsive institution at every touchpoint.

The lenders who win will earn trust before the first conversation

Winning in today’s market isn’t just about having the best rates or the most loan products. It’s about being the institution borrowers find, trust, and choose—often before they ever pick up the phone.

The financial institutions that get ahead will be the ones treating reputation as an operating signal rather than a marketing metric. They’ll use customer feedback as real-time intelligence. They’ll build the kind of consistent, trusted digital presence that earns borrowers in a world where AI is increasingly answering the question, “Who should I work with?”

That’s what Total Expert and Birdeye make possible—together.

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