We all know about red flags. Those sometimes subtle, sometimes overt, warnings that if not acted upon can be costly and painful. All businesses see them, but often due to circumstance or even hubris, they are not addressed timely. As a lender, when you’re busy with volume and drowning in the overflow of new business, generally your subservicer is low on the priority list. Even though you may not like your current subservicer’s performance, how they are treating your customers, switching sits on the backburner. As a result, you may miss or ignore the many red flags, such as empty promises, compliance failures, and poor customer service.

Maybe you’re inclined to believe that it’s just the typical ebbs and flows of business. That being treated like a low priority is ok for now, or that it’s ‘just how it is.’ But what if it doesn’t have to be? When it comes to handling your or your customer’s needs, ‘substandard’ should not be the standard. At TMS, we pride ourselves on delivering the rock-solid service that customers and clients deserve. It’s one of our core values. Let’s take a look at some of the subservicing red flags that could be costing you.

Empty promises

Empty promises generally top the list of red flags. Usually because everyone begins a new subservicing partnership with high hopes. It’s the ‘honeymoon’ phase. During this time your subservicer is attentive to your needs and your customers get some extra attention. However, that slowly starts to fade as time goes by. KPI performance drops, emails and calls get ignored, and then there is a perpetual echo of “we are working to fix that” or they give you just enough ‘happy talk’ to appease you another month. You begin to feel like you are on the dance floor without a partner. Most subservicers talk about partnering but is it a true partnership when you’re spending your days playing follow up on delayed responses? And why is it that you are always having to come up with all the ideas? With sub-par subservicers you feel as if you are treated like a small fish in a big pond.

These empty promises leave you constantly in reactive mode. You shouldn’t need to spend your time babysitting or playing catch up–when your focus should be on growing your business. With TMS you don’t have to.

“We’ve made the right decision to form a subservicing partnership with TMS. We felt their expertise in loan servicing was aligned with our strategic direction and they offered consistent quality of service to our customer base.”

• Mario Ragazzone Jr., VP Loan Servicing, EMM Loans

“It’s really a breath of fresh air working with TMS. We have one rep to deal with and he has always been great. Very responsive on pretty much a daily basis—which is a lot better than what we had with our other subservicer.”

• John Gillespie, Servicing Manager, V.I.P Mortgage

TMS is originally an originator

Because we started out as originators, we’ve heard those same empty promises you have. Originally an originator, we understand and have felt those pain points. Our mission is to grow happiness, and all too often that happiness was lost when we turned our customers over to our subservicer. It was red flag after red flag. When we realized this substandard service was par for the course everywhere in our industry, we knew it was imperative to change the way the servicing business was done. As a result, we dedicated ourselves to putting an end to sub-par subservicing. We saw first-hand how deep the need was to combine innovative technology with caring people to truly grow happiness with customers and clients. The fundamental infrastructure of subservicing needed to change, so we changed it.

It’s why we built our award-winning servicing platform, SIME (Servicing Intelligence Made Easy). With us, lenders have full transparency into their portfolio of loans. They can see everything right at their fingertips:

• Get a 360º, 24/7/365, fully-transparent, 100% accessible, on-demand view of your portfolio
• Customizable dashboards
• 90+ standard and customizable customer reports
• Customer payment trends
• Loan-level detail and raw data
• Customer call recordings
• Records of how/when TMS has interacted with customers
• And more…

And because SIME powers TMS’ Happinest app and customer website, customers can manage all their mortgage affairs like making payments, uploading/downloading documents, getting payment notifications — all in the palm of their hands, anywhere, anytime, leading to our 82% self-service rate.

Poor KPI performance

When you’re working with a subservicer who’s sold you empty promises, poor KPI performance is unfortunately a byproduct and another red flag.

Indicators like high delinquency rates are a result of a subservicer lacking a proactive outreach or poor analytics. Low loss mitigation rates are the result of a subservicer putting limited effort into helping borrowers resolve their unique challenges.

TMS has less than 1 minute hold times and has a 92% first-call resolution rate. Our caring customer service agents (CAREologists) go through 220+ hours of training yearly to ensure they have the knowledge to answer just about any question or resolve any issue on the first call. We recruit people who live our core values so that we can deliver a class leading customer experience with a real human connection on every call.

TMS’ proactive approach means having effective loss mitigation and collection strategies to help customers get back on track. For those that we unfortunately cannot help, we have leading foreclosure, bankruptcy, and REO services to ensure that assets are managed timely.

With the market landscape, regulatory environment, and your customers’ needs always in flux, you need a quick reacting, dynamic subservicer who understands the importance of meeting customers where they are at, while ensuring KPI targets are met…. compliantly.

Lack of visibility into your portfolio

If you’ve ever felt like getting portfolio and performance data from your subservicer is like pulling teeth, you’re not at the dentists’ office, but you have identified another red flag. Why is it that most of the time you are wholly dependent on your subservicer for even basic information? With TMS’ SIME platform, you have an unobstructed and real-time self-serviceable, 360-degree view into everything… and we mean everything. You can see the health of your portfolio, KPI performance, listen to phone calls, see where each account is at in loss mitigation, the list is endless.

Poor customer service is not the norm

If your subservicer relies primarily on a singular communication channel (i.e., phone call) for your customers to interact with them, you’ve just dialed up another red flag. Customers today are more sophisticated and prefer communication across multiple channels. Text, push, email, web, app, chat, should be readily available to complement the traditional phone call. At TMS we are experience obsessed. We believe that every interaction with a customer is an opportunity to grow happiness, grow your brand, and ultimately create a loyal customer for life. It’s this execution on our core value of rock-solid service that gives us a 98% customer satisfaction rate, and an industry leading 83% Net Promoter Score.

Compliance is the norm at TMS

You could say compliance is part of our DNA. It’s embedded in everything we do. Partnering with TMS means partnering with a subservicer who does it the right way every time. As such, we bolster three lines of defense: Business Unit Risk Management (including Quality Assurance); Compliance Testing and Monitoring; and Internal Audit. All work in unison and collaboratively across our entire organization to assure we’re compliant with federal, state, agency, and client requirements at all times. While the letters “T” and “I” are not in the words red flag, if your subservicer isn’t crossing and dotting every one of them, then you have identified another red flag. One that can put you at risk and can cost you considerably.

Now is the time

With rates increasing, the origination business has started to subside. This presents a time to honestly evaluate your current subservicing relationship and see if it’s lined with red flags. If so, then this is a prime opportunity to take advantage of capacity created in the slowing market to switch to a subservicer who is committed to and will deliver industry leading service to you and your customers. In today’s market it is critical to have a subservicing partner who can enhance your brand and retain your current customers, helping to mitigate margin compression and customer acquisition costs.

And at TMS we make switching seamless for you and your customers. We handle as many as 25 client transfers each year, via a transparent, stress-tested, and fully-assisted process that ensures minimal disruption to the customer. In other words, we’ve got the process down to a science.

Are you done with the red flags and ready for some smiles? Come grow happiness with TMS and make the switch to a committed and collaborative partner. Your customers and your bottom line will thank you.