Low Inventory Doldrums? Here’s the Cure

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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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‍Total Expert Founder & CEO Joe Welu recently joined the HousingWire Daily podcast to break down how AI is helping lenders have smarter, more personal conversations with borrowers—at a scale that simply wasn't possible before.

In early 2025, Total Expert launched our AI Sales Assistant. Since then, the mortgage industry's relationship with AI has fundamentally changed—and Total Expert Founder and CEO Joe Welu says the results have been unlike anything the company has seen in over a decade of building lending technology.

"The innovation this past 6 to 12 months has been nothing short of extraordinary," Welu told HousingWire's Sarah Wheeler. "The results that we've been able to get with our customers have been really like nothing we've ever seen."

The lending challenge AI is built to solve

At its core, AI Sales Assistant addresses one of lending's most persistent challenges: the gap between an originator’s intentions and their bandwidth. Even the best originators can only connect with so many contacts in a given day, week, or month. And if they want those connections to feel personalized from the borrower or homeowner’s perspective, cookie-cutter emails and phone calls won’t cut it. It takes time. And that’s a very finite resource.  

So, originators have a choice: spend time making each interaction more impactful but reduce the number of contacts they can engage or choose quantity over quality and risk eroding your relationships by failing to personalize your communications.  

AI Sales Assistant was designed to close that gap not by replacing originators but by giving them something they've never had: perfect memory and infinite reach. Nobody can remember every detail from a conversation they had six months ago, and they can't personally reach out to every past customer when rates drop or when they reach an equity threshold.

"If you think about a top producing originator who wants to stay really deeply connected to their customers," Welu explained, "the dependencies are often just the time and human horsepower required to reach out and engage with every one of those consumers."

AI Sales Assistant is on pace to 130 million calls this year; each one personalized to the borrower or homeowner’s specific financial situation, tailored to meet the lender’s unique brand, and trained to comply with industry regulations.

Context is everything: Introducing Customer IQ

What makes Total Expert's approach different isn't just the volume of conversations; it's the depth of context behind each one thanks to Customer IQ.

Customer IQ aggregates and analyzes the data that matters most for homeownership and lending: servicing data, real-time product and pricing information, conversation history, consent records, and more. It creates a continuously enriched contact record of every customer and lead, so that every human and AI-powered engagement is grounded in what actually matters to that borrower right now—even as short-term priorities shift and long-term goals evolve.

"Context is really about helping our customers understand what matters most to that consumer at any given time," Welu said.

When a borrower mentions during a call that they're helping their child buy a house, or that they're thinking about downsizing for retirement, that context gets captured, fed back into Customer IQ, and made available to the originator so their next conversation will be more personalized and more meaningful.  

The human–AI handoff

A key design principle for Total Expert is knowing that there will always be a time when AI needs to step aside and let a human take over. If a borrower hesitates or the conversation isn't flowing, our AI Sales Assistant detects it and seamlessly offers to connect the consumer with an originator in real time or schedule a meeting for a later date.

"Because our AI is trained specifically on mortgage use cases and the types of conversations originators are having every day,” Welu continues. “The AI can sense when conversation isn't going in the direction we want it to," Welu explained. "At that moment, if the originator is available, we can live transfer that customer and just get two humans on the phone."

Lenders have significant control over how and when that handoff happens. Total Expert works closely with each customer to craft conversation flows that match their brand, their compliance requirements, and their vision for the borrower experience.

Unlocking products lenders have left on the table

One of the most compelling use cases for AI in lending is to surface home equity opportunities that originators have historically had little time or interest to pursue. That’s because equity discussions often require educating homeowners on their options for leveraging that equity. If a homeowner doesn’t have an immediate need to pay down debt or fund a large expense, for example, those conversations can quickly become dead ends.

But if Customer IQ identifies a homeowner with significant high-interest revolving debt and available home equity, AI Sales Assistant can leverage that insight to proactively reach out, explain the consolidation opportunity, and send the homeowner a link to start the application—all while keeping the originator informed as the opportunity moves forward.

"The originator retains a customer, their brand stays at the forefront, and the homeowner gets an incredible financial outcome," Welu said. "And now the relationship becomes deeper and more connected because you've been able to deliver something they didn’t expect but definitely needed."

Democratizing what only the biggest lenders could do

Historically, maintaining consistent post-close outreach required massive call center operations that only the largest organizations could sustain. Voice-first AI agents combined with Customer IQ level the playing field for lenders, banks, and credit unions of all sizes.

"What voice AI has done is democratize it," Welu said. "Customer IQ with voice AI gives every lender the ability to say, why can't we have 100% retention of our customers? What's stopping us now?”

Lenders using Customer IQ + AI Sales Assistant have already doubled their recapture rates. And as rate windows open and close with increasing speed, the ability to reach the right borrower at exactly the right moment has never been more valuable.

What's next?

Looking ahead to the rest of 2026, Welu is energized by what he sees as a fundamental reimagining of the lending industry, one where AI elevates people to the highest levels of both creativity and productivity, and where consumers consistently receive the kind of personalized, contextually aware experience that was previously impossible to deliver at scale in this industry.

"I'm excited and energized every day by this reimagining of what’s possible in our industry," he said. "We can elevate people to a place that makes their jobs more meaningful and fulfilling. Ultimately, that will lead to better, more consistent outcomes for consumers. It's win-win across the board."

🎧 Listen to the full episode on HousingWire Daily