Lending

The Customer Journey: Then and Now

5 mins read
August 29, 2018
By
Total Expert

In the past, when our grandparents wanted to buy their first home, they went down to the local bank and sat down face to face with a loan officer. Then when they wanted to buy their vacation home, a rental property or downsize, they went back to the bank and sat down with that loan officer again.

Loan officers were able to build trust and long-term relationships face to face and they knew the needs of their customers because they truly knew them – their children, their hobbies and their neighborhood.

Somewhere along the way, large financial transactions became more transaction-focused instead of relationship-focused. You can focus on the transaction and gain a customer for a day or you can focus on the relationship and gain a customer for life.

The Evolution of the Customer Journey

Today, it is increasingly difficult for loan officers to stay front and center with their clients. According to digital marketing experts cited in Forbes, the average consumer is exposed to 10,000 marketing messages per day. Cutting through the noise is hard. Building a meaningful relationship with your customers to the point where they come back to you years later for their next home purchase is even harder.

To top it all off, profits continue to compress with the cost per mortgage loan hovering around $8,500, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

As we talk to our customers and prospects, loan officers and CMOs around the country, everyone agrees that it is critical to cultivate customers for life – providing so much value that your customers come back to you again and again.

Repeat customers are less expensive than new customers – five times less expensive according to Invesp. Similarly, increasing customer retention by only five percent can increase a company’s profits by 25 to 95 percent.  

In addition, research shows people want face to face interaction when making complex financial purchases. In the digital age, it’s still critical for loan officers to build relationships face to face.

Creating a customer for life is hard – especially when there are so many times and ways you can lose track of them.

In our example, we have Jenny, our loan officer. She’s at her son’s soccer practice and starts talking with another parent, Max. Max’s family just moved to the area and are renting until they decide about their next steps. Jenny gives Max her card and they go their separate ways. Soccer season ends, snow falls and Max threw away Jenny’s card long ago.

In the spring, Max’s family is ready to buy a house, but he hasn’t heard from Jenny and doesn’t even think about tracking her down. Their real estate agent asks if they want a loan officer referral and they start working with a new loan officer, Bob.

Bob helps Max’s family close their mortgage loan. He’s great and very helpful, but after they close the loan, Max never hears from Bob – ever. Ten years later, Max wants to buy a rental property in their town, but he doesn’t even think about Bob – or remember his name.

And so, Max uses a different loan officer referral from his real estate agent.

A Strategic, Scalable Approach to Cultivating Customers for Life

All throughout the customer journey, loan officers are losing track of leads because they may not be ready to buy or past customers because they may not be ready to buy again – yet. A failure to communicate is losing loan officers money every day.

This is where Total Expert comes in. We help loan officers not only communicate and stay front and center with prospects and customers, but we also help them personalize and automate their marketing and communications to prospects, customers and partners.

Companies like Amazon and Uber have raised consumer expectations around online commerce. Total Expert helps loan officers meet – and exceed – these expectations.

The Total Expert Marketing Operating System is the hub for your marketing and sales efforts – the fastest way from lead to customer to customer for life. And, critically, we empower your loan officers to elevate their local marketing programs at scale throughout the enterprise.

If Jenny, our loan officer from the example we shared, had been using Total Expert, she could have input Max’s contact information and personal details right into Total Expert on her phone as they watched soccer practice that afternoon. She could have started him on a personalized, automated, multi-channel marketing campaign and sent him pertinent and helpful information about the housing market in their area – providing Max with valuable information and keeping her name in his inbox.

Then, the following spring when Max’s family was ready to buy, he would have thought about Jenny, the valuable insights she’d sent to him and reached out for information and help buying their home.

Jenny would have been able to help Max secure that first home loan – and then continued to market to him, continually adding value and providing insights on the housing market – personalized to Max, his family and their needs. Then, no doubt, Max would have come back to Jenny ten years and lots of personalized marketing later, for help buying their rental property.

It’s critical for loan officers to market and communicate to prospects and clients – to keep their name at the top of their inbox and provide ongoing value and insights through educational marketing.

It’s even more critical that your marketing and communications efforts are personalized to the individual. The last thing any loan officer wants to do is waste time, money and effort marketing to a new college graduate about buying a vacation home. And – as we all know, this new college graduate would immediately feel like the loan officer didn’t “get” him and his needs, so the loan officer would lose his business before he was even ready to buy his first home.

Right Message, Right Person, Right Time – Always

Personalized marketing and communications can take a lot of time – unless it’s automated. The Total Expert MOS removes the burden from relationship managers with multi-channel marketing and communication automation: email, web, social, text, video and even loan status updates can all be sent through Total Expert. Total Expert enables loan officers to deliver the right message at the right time to the right person – providing incredible value and creating customers for life.

Total Expert empowers relationship managers to market and communicate to prospects and clients in a very personalized manner that is automated to save them time and money, which they can then pour into building relationships face to face.

Resources

Related posts

AI

[Lykken on Lending podcast] Supercharging Mortgage Lending with AI

mins read
Read more

The mortgage industry is in the midst of a historic transformation—and artificial intelligence is leading the way. Our Founder & CEO, Joe Welu, joined David Lykken for an episode of the Lykken on Lending podcast to discuss how Total Expert’s AI solutions will reshape the customer journey for lenders.

From incubating leads and mining databases to nurturing post-close relationships, Joe shares how voice AI is giving loan officers “superpowers” that help scale productivity, improve retention, and focus on delivering the high-value advice consumers need most. With compliance guardrails built in and multiple AI agents on the horizon, this episode offers an inside look at the future of mortgage lending and why early adopters of AI will hold a major competitive edge.

Joe also explains why the human element remains central to homeownership, and how AI is designed not to replace loan officers, but to free them up for more meaningful conversations that strengthen customer trust and drive long-term loyalty.

Catch the conversation to hear how AI is revolutionizing lending and why Joe believes those who embrace it will be tomorrow’s market leaders.

Supercharging Mortgage Lending with AI
AI

[Daily Mortgage News Podcast] Joe Welu Talks Agentic AI in the Mortgage Industry

mins read
Read more

Total Expert Founder & CEO Joe Welu recently joined Robbie Chrisman for an episode of the Daily Mortgage News podcast where they discussed the current (and future) state of the mortgage industry, challenges facing lenders and loan officers, and the solutions that AI-enabled tools can provide in difficult markets.

Agentic AI is reshaping loan officer productivity and customer engagement. With Total Expert’s new AI Sales Assistant, lenders can automate lead incubation and qualification—achieving human-like conversion rates in weeks, not months. Joe also highlights the power of voice AI to revive aged leads, trigger refinance opportunities, and prevent deals from falling through the cracks, all without the need for massive call centers and without removing loan officers’ ability to build authentic human connections with borrowers and homeowners.

That’s because AI-enabled tools are designed to reduce the administrative and repetitive tasks that take you away from what you do best: advising customers and guiding them toward the best possible financial outcomes. Joe also shares insights on selecting AI partners wisely, managing data responsibly, and capitalizing on both front- and back-office efficiencies. As the AI arms race heats up, Total Expert aims to empower originators—not replace them.

Joe and Robbie's discussion begins at the 4:55 mark.

AI

Delivering AI Solutions that Drive Real Value in Financial Services

mins read
Read more

By Pete Karns, Chief Product Officer, Total Expert

AI is no longer a future state—it’s already here, embedded in everything from ride-sharing apps and food service to factories and farms. In the world of financial services, though, this ubiquity comes with pressure to integrate AI fast, appear innovative, and keep up with competitors—all while being mindful of evolving federal and state compliance requirements. Moving fast without a plan or awareness of up and downstream implications often leads to AI-enabled solutions that either underdeliver or don’t deliver at all.

At Total Expert, we’ve taken a different path: thoughtful integration over flashy announcements. As more financial institutions wrestle with what “real AI adoption” should look like, here’s what we’ve learned and what lenders need to consider to get it right.

Where enterprise AI goes wrong

Too many financial services leaders have experienced what I call “AI failure to launch (and scale).” They’ve rushed to try unintegrated AI-enable offerings and bolt on AI tools—often generalist chatbots, white-labeled versions of generative tools, and/or hooking up to MCP servers—without a clear sense of how these tools will solve their business problems or add potential risk. The result? The occasional value-add result. However, what we see more is poor user adoption, wasted spend, and limited impact.

This is the same trap we saw with “digital transformation” a decade ago, or the original horizontal SaaS applications that evolved or were replaced by vertical-specific solutions. AI-enabled solutions offer tremendous, generational promise but they risk becoming vanity-first, value-later tools. We are focused on the former.

AI that thinks and adapts: Welcome to agentic AI

Let’s make one thing clear: not all AI is created equal.  

Chatbots have been commonplace in financial services for a decade now, but remain rigid, rule-based tools that handle repetitive tasks.  I’ve worked with “AI” services for more than 15 years and each had their own place and potential when used properly. Herein lies the opportunity. Modern lenders that are focused on retaining and growing their customers in an ultra-competitive market need something more dynamic. Enter AI agents that can understand context, adapt on the fly, and speak in a human-like way. These agents are coachable, brand-aware, and learn from every interaction. They don’t follow scripts—they think in real time. And when built correctly, they become a seamless part of your customer experience.

This is the evolution from AI as a support function to AI as a trusted team member.

Total Expert recently launched an AI Sales Assistant that puts this principle into action. It functions as a scalable, intelligent teammate—able to engage leads, deliver personalized conversations, and identify high-potential opportunities—all while staying aligned with your brand voice and compliance requirements. It’s not a chatbot bolted onto a CRM—it’s a fully integrated AI-enabled solution, utilizing data, embedding within workflow orchestration, and playing nice with application logic because it has the necessary context to work within your lending ecosystem.

The real “why” behind AI adoption

Before choosing any AI solution, or any technology solution, financial services firms must ask themselves: What business problem are we solving?

For example, when mortgage rates dropped for a few weeks in September 2024, our customer intelligence capabilities identified nearly $2 billion in immediate refinance opportunities. But no team of loan officers could scale quickly enough to reach every qualified lead. That’s where AI tools prove invaluable—automating first-touch outreach at scale, surfacing the best opportunities, and empowering human teams to scale up execution to drive retention and growth.

Why embedded beats bolted-on

The types of AI-enabled solutions we are talking about can’t function effectively in isolation. Without access to timely and accurate customer data, and invoked within a specific workflow process, it can’t personalize interactions, anticipate needs, or drive conversions at the right time.

Picture an AI assistant offering a refinance to a customer, only to stall when asked for more details. If it doesn’t know the customer’s current rate or financial profile, the experience feels hollow. That’s not just ineffective—it damages trust.

By contrast, when AI-enabled solutions are embedded within a unified customer experience platform like Total Expert, it draws on a 360-degree view of the customer. It knows the data, understands the history, and delivers contextually rich conversations that convert.

This is why we’re designing our AI capabilities with a focus on the unique needs of financial services organizations. The same purpose-built approach has earned the Total Expert platform its unmatched reputation for usability and time to value.

Generalist AI offerings can be a gamble that increase costs—and time to value

Implementing AI that’s not purpose-built for financial services introduces two major risks:

1. Usability failure: Your team must spend months customizing and configuring a generalist AI tool to make it work for your specific needs—if it will ever work at all. For example, imagine you’re a loan officer and one of your referral partners introduces you to a borrower. Now, you have to choose the best way to approach the first conversation with this borrower. There are countless permutations of questions and answers which all require deep personalization, compliance awareness, and consistent representation of the sales processes and brand tone of the lender. Generalist AIs will quickly reach their limitations in these complex use cases.

An industry-focused AI offering will be trained on this specific use case and provided with the context needed to hold a dynamic conversation with the borrower. This type of AI learns and adapts with each interaction, performing the most time-consuming tasks so you don’t have to.    

2. Compliance risk: Without built-in industry guardrails, you’re gambling with regulatory violations and brand safety.  As we know, the compliance landscape for financial services is broad and evolving at the federal and state level.  Look for AI offerings that are regulatory aware and enable you to configure them based on your organization’s risk tolerance and interpretations.

Lenders don’t need more tools—they need the right tools—ones that work out of the box, understand industry nuances, and deliver immediate, compliant value.

Ask these questions before you commit to an AI offering  

To maximize the probability of success, here’s a quick checklist for vetting solutions:

  • Can it solve a real, high-value business problem, and how? Review specific examples and ask to speak with other organizations that have implemented the tool.
  • Does it function as a true AI agent, not a static bot?
  • Can it be deeply integrated into your core system(s), workflow orchestration, and data?
  • Does it include financial industry compliance and brand guardrails?
  • Can it scale without sacrificing quality or regulatory integrity?

Building the future with purpose-built AI

Total Expert has always designed technology with financial services in mind, and our approach to utilizing AI is no different. We’re not chasing hype. We’re solving problems.

Our focus on AI isn’t simply building standalone features—it’s about embedded, intelligent, and deeply integrated AI solutions. It’s helping lenders scale smarter, engage more meaningfully, and turn data into action. Our AI Sales Assistant is just the beginning—an example of how purpose-built, AI-enabled solutions can solve real problems and deliver tangible value. We are already testing and exploring other AI-enabled solutions and I could not be more excited about the current and potential value our clients and our market will achieve.

Because when AI works, it’s not just impressive—it’s indispensable.

See Total Expert
in action

Sign up
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
Create sustainable growth and increase loyalty with a customer engagement platform that’s purpose-built for financial institutions.
Schedule a demo