AI-powered chatbots are coming to the mortgage servicing industry. But there is still a question as to how receptive borrowers will be to this new interactive technology.
According to a recent report from J.D. Power, three-fourths of business leaders say they are planning to escalate their AI investments, as they see its potential to redefine customer service and many other business functions.
That includes the lending industry, in which AI-powered customer service has already started to establish a foothold and is poised to grow.
In its recent Lending Intelligence Report, J.D. Power highlights the prevailing sentiment and emerging trends in AI-powered customer service, and how that may change with the continued uptick in servicer adoption.
Arguably one of the biggest barriers to adoption of AI-powered customer service solutions is customers’ perception of online chat, J.D. Power says in its report. Early iterations of chatbots left many customers feeling like they were simply wasting their time.
But that may be changing. Overall, 21% of mortgage servicing customers have experienced a problem in the past 12 months. Just 9% of those customers used online chat as their first point of contact. That pales in comparison with the 48% that called customer service, but customers from Generation Y and Z are three times more likely to use online chat than older generations so this channel will become increasingly important.
The good news is that the majority of customers who use chat found it to be useful. Two-thirds (67%) of customers using chat say it was to try to solve a problem. Of that group, 83% say their problem was resolved on that chat.
Unsurprisingly, those who were able to solve their problem via chat had an overall customer satisfaction rating of 702 (on a 1,000-point scale) vs. 482 for those who could not solve their problem.
The Lending Intelligence Report is based on responses from the J.D. Power 2024 Mortgage Servicer Satisfaction Study, which included 11,565 responses and was fielded from May 2023 through February 2024.
Photo: Steve Johnson
