The cost of losing touch with clients

“People are becoming overwhelmed because there is so much they just don’t know about their client base,” says Geoff Willis, president of OTTO Mortgage Systems. “There are brokers who have five or 10 years invested, and all of a sudden they have a thousand customers and they are asking themselves, ‘Where do my opportunities lie here?’”

When a broker’s book of clients expands to such stratospheric levels, maintaining those day-to-day relationships becomes impossible – and it becomes all too easy to lose touch for months at a time, or even years.

“In many cases they (brokers) are just doing applications when people phone them,” Willis told MBN.

But those attitudes are changing, and brokers are knocking on the door asking software and CRM providers for solutions to better manage their book of past clients.

In fact, some high-profile independents are choosing to affiliate with the larger networks so that they have access to a CRM just to manage their book of past clients more effectively.

“We got to the point in volumes where we needed a CRM,” Lorne Rackel of Jayman Financial told MBN. “We needed a platform so we could contact and mine our database and stay in regular touch with our customers.”

But the system must be easy enough for agents to use in order for the principal broker to maximize buy-in by sales people, says Willis.

“There’s a lot of software out there now that does this, that and the other thing; but you have to have software that is dead simple, and be able to bring in existing data,” he says. “That is the thing you spend the most time on when developing new technology – to make it user friendly.”

MBN