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Get ready. It’s Olympic season! I’m going to age myself here, but there’s a moment from the 1992 Olympics (no, not the Dream Team) that resurfaces every few years, and every time I see it, it gets me. British sprinter Derek Redmond had trained his entire life for the 400-meter sprint event in Barcelona. He was in peak form and widely expected to contend for a medal. Halfway through his semifinal heat, he felt his hamstring tear. He collapsed in pain and the race was effectively over for Derek.
But instead of staying down, he stood up and began hobbling toward the finish line. A man broke through security and ran onto the track — it was his father. He put his arm around Derek and helped him finish the race. He didn’t win, much less medal. But that finish is remembered more vividly than most gold-medal performances.
I’ve been thinking about that moment as I review borrower feedback from our MortgageCX program. Most loans start with optimism and high expectations. Everyone believes they’re on pace for a smooth closing. But then a timeline slips by a few days, or a document gets requested twice. Those things create an inflection point. What we do with them becomes a lasting memory for the borrower, for better or worse.
Our question for this month: When the loan process strains, what will your borrower remember?
Behavioral psychologists have shown that people don’t remember experiences evenly. We’re wired with what’s called a negativity bias — negative moments carry more weight than positive ones. It takes multiple smooth interactions to offset a single stressful surprise.
Layer onto that the peak-end rule — the idea that people judge experiences largely by the most emotionally intense moment and how the experience ends. In a mortgage transaction, those peaks are predictable: the appraisal call, the clear-to-close moment, the final numbers on the closing disclosure. The ending, of course, is the closing itself.
That means a borrower’s lasting memory of a 45-day loan process can hinge on how you handle one two-minute conversation.
MortgageCX data backs this up. Loan officers consistently score in the mid-90s in performance ratings. Borrowers like them and trust them. And yet, nearly half of loans contain at least one breakdown in the key drivers of advocacy — things like expectation setting, repeat document requests, or proactive communication. When even one of those slips, Net Promoter Score (NPS) drops sharply.
Borrowers can love you and still not refer you. And in today’s purchase-driven market, referrals aren’t a “nice-to-have”. They are your lifeblood.
Most lenders believe referrals are driven primarily by relationships. And relationships absolutely matter. But sales psychology tells us that referrals are not triggered by satisfaction alone — they’re triggered by confidence.
When a borrower refers a friend, they are putting their own reputation on the line. That requires certainty. Even small process miscues create micro-doubt. A timeline that slips without explanation. A surprise at closing. A document requested twice. None of these are catastrophic on their own. But they introduce friction. And friction erodes confidence.
The loan still closes. The borrower says thank you. But the emotional certainty required to recommend you never fully forms.
What we see in MortgageCX data is that process execution drives advocacy at a significantly higher rate than relationship alone. The likeability of the LO cannot fully compensate for a process that feels unpredictable or reactive.
And most of these inflection points are predictable:
These are emotional pressure points. When mishandled — or simply under-led — they become the defining memory of the experience.
If you want your borrower to have positive memories, there are really two levers you need to pay attention to.
1. Prevention. The Seven Commandments we track in MortgageCX aren’t theoretical ideals. They represent the handful of behaviors that most strongly correlate with advocacy. Clear expectations around timelines. No repeat document requests. Proactive updates before the borrower has to ask. Thoughtful preparation for closing. When all seven are executed well, NPS climbs into the high 90s. Break even one, and loyalty begins to erode.
This requires more than encouragement to “provide great service.” It requires measuring specifically where friction occurs and coaching to those behaviors.
2. Leadership in the moment. There’s a concept in service psychology known as the service recovery paradox — when handled well, a mistake can actually strengthen loyalty because it demonstrates competence and care under pressure. The key phrase is “handled well.”
Silence makes borrowers uneasy. Defensiveness makes things worse. Owning it tends to settle everything down. A proactive call that says, “Here’s what happened, here’s what it means, and here’s what we’re doing next,” stabilizes the borrower emotionally. It turns a tear in the hamstring into a moment of steadiness. That’s the part people remember.
Final Thought: Derek Redmond didn’t win a medal, but the world remembers how he finished. Borrowers won’t remember every smooth upload or automated email. They’ll remember whether the process felt steady when it mattered most.
In a market like this, those inflection points are leverage points. They either strengthen confidence or weaken it. Borrowers don’t expect a flawless race. They expect someone who can help them finish strong. Mike Seminari
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