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Back in my college days, I had the bright idea of cutting my own hair to save money. So, I borrowed my roommate’s clippers and went to town, then finished off with a blonde-in-a-box coloring kit from Walgreens. The result was a cross between “1950s buzzcut” and “lawnmower blade malfunction” with a color that might best be described as “tangerine.” Needless to say, I wore a hat for three weeks. The moral of my story? Some endeavors, like growing revenue in a tight mortgage market, look a lot easier on the surface than they actually are. And short-term plays can backfire spectacularly when you’re not strategic about where to trim and when to invest.
Which brings us to this month’s question: Where should mortgage lenders and servicers be focusing to grow revenue in today’s tight market?
During recent conversations and STRATMOR workshops, we’ve noticed a distinct shift in strategy among lenders and servicers. For years, the playbook was largely focused on lead generation: more SEO traffic, more personal brand awareness, more third-party leads. The assumption was, “If we can just direct more people into the funnel, we’ll get more business.”
But now, with volume down and cost-per-loan therefore through the roof, that thinking is shifting. Leadership teams are asking more strategic questions:
This mindset change has brought new attention to one of the most overlooked sources of revenue in the mortgage lifecycle: the servicing relationship. What we’re seeing—and hearing in leadership meetings across the industry—is that lenders are waking up to something we’ve known for years at STRATMOR:
A poor loan experience doesn’t just hurt pull-through or NPS. It handicaps your servicing relationship from day one.
It’s hard to deliver a warm, trustworthy servicing experience when the borrower is still carrying baggage from an inconsistent origination process. It’s even harder to talk about retention when the borrower barely remembers who you are—or worse, still harbors quiet resentment about closing day surprises, unmet expectations, or doc-request déjà vu.
And it’s not just retention that’s at stake.
Pull-through, repeat business, and borrower advocacy all hinge on one thing: the quality of the customer experience.
When that experience is simple, clean, consistent, and yes—delightful—everything gets easier.
In short: delight delivers—in every direction.
So instead of cutting your way to survival this year, what if you optimized your way to smarter, more sustainable growth?
Let’s explore how.
Here are seven ways smart lenders and servicers can drive growth right now—without torching budgets or morale:
1. Acquire Efficiency via Acquisition
You don’t have to be a megabank or mega-IMB to make M&A work in your favor. Strategic acquisitions can expand your footprint, talent pool, and borrower database—often more effectively than growing organically. STRATMOR’s Garth Graham is your guy for this. He’s seen behind the curtain of hundreds of deals and knows how to spot value (and avoid hidden cost traps and bad cultural mojo).
2. Boost Interest-to-App Pull-Through
Want more apps without buying more leads? Start by tightening up your first impressions. STRATMOR’s secret shopping data shows that most lenders bleed opportunity during the initial contact phase. From awkward greetings to slow responses, to no-responses (the most common, believe it or not), it’s a preventable mess. Senior Advisor Brett McCracken leads our Secret Shopping program—and he can help you plug the leak.
3. Fix the Friction in Your Loan Process
App-to-close pull-through rates, typically 60-70%, take a hit when borrowers encounter friction—repeated doc requests, radio silence, surprise delays. And every miscue cuts into your NPS and referral base. STRATMOR’s MortgageCX program identifies the process potholes that cost you closings—and helps you pave over them with personalized reporting and scorecards for every employee: LOs, processors, sales managers, operations managers, and executive leadership.
4. Turn Delight into Referrals
Here’s the math: one delighted borrower = 1.4 referrals (on average). But only delight earns referrals — not “satisfied,” not “fine,” and definitely not “I don’t even remember who my LO was.” MortgageCX helps lenders go beyond good and build wow-worthy experiences, while reputation management tools amplify that borrower love across the web.
5. Treat Servicing Like a Relationship, Not a Sales Opportunity
Retention doesn’t start when rates drop—it starts with the tone you set during onboarding. Lenders with higher retention rates don’t just reach out to “sell” a new loan to their servicing base. They offer value between transactions. Try a “mortgage check-up,” an open Q&A call, or an annual escrow explainer. Soft touches win hearts—and return business.
6. Consolidate Vendors to Cut Costs (and Chaos)
One lender I spoke with last week was juggling one platform for survey administration, another for national benchmarking, and a third tool for reputation management. When they realized MortgageCX could handle all three (with unified reporting and at a lower cost), I could swear I saw dollar signs flashing in their eyes. Don’t underestimate the value of vendor consolidation—in dollars or simplicity.
7. Reconnect Servicing with Sales
This one’s a biggie. The servicers who retain over 60% of borrowers don’t wait for a credit trigger or a payoff request to act. They create seamless handoffs between servicing and the original LO—or establish a new LO relationship early in the cycle. They also typically have data analytics that helps identify potential prospects before they raise their hand for help, creating a proactive campaign to connect with customers. Connection is everything. If you can’t remember the last time your servicing team and sales team were in a room together, start there.
If you’re ready to grow without gambling, here are three moves you can make this quarter:
Remember: Whether it’s your hairline or your bottom line, a little impulsive trimming can do more harm than good if you don’t think a few steps ahead. Smart growth is a game of thoughtful adjustments, not desperate slashing.
And trust me, reaching out for some help ends up a whole lot better than cutting your own hair.
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