These are busy times for everyone in the mortgage industry, thanks to the continued volatility in a market that is battling to touch down safely.
In light of this ongoing tumult, The Intermediary spoke with Nicola Oates, inbound intermediary support team manager at Accord Mortgages, for a fly-on-the-wall insight into what this means for a busy broker hub.
Tell us a little about Accord’s operation.
Our contact centre is based at our Yorkshire Drive offices in Bradford, where our expert team handles all broker queries via a range of channels.
We’ve recently relaunched our website to make self-service criteria and fact checking as easy as possible for brokers, to save them time, and this is backed up by a chatbot tool, featuring automated answers to frequently asked questions inputted by our team.
However, we ensure that intermediaries can get hold of a human being at any stage if their query is more complex, via our face-to-face business development manager (BDM) relationships out in the field, and our telephone business development advisor (BDA) and people-driven webchat services based at Yorkshire Drive.
What does a typical working day look like for your Yorkshire Drive team?
Our first priority every day is to make sure everyone’s logged on and ready to deal with brokers’ calls. We’ll also look at our rotas to make sure our people – who are all skilled in dealing through every channel – are assigned to the right one at any given time, adapting and moving people around as needed to manage peaks and troughs in activity.
Our supervisors and I sit behind the team, ready to intervene if they can see they’ve been caught up in dealing with one particular query for a while, to support them in escalating it and keeping things moving as quickly and efficiently as possible.
This is also backed up by pinpoint-accurate data which is coming in all the time, from out in the field and down the lines, and shows us all of the business and call trends we’re seeing at a glance, to enable us to respond as necessary – whether that’s to unblock a service glitch or look to fill a product or service gap over the medium term, for which we’re seeing a lot of unmet demand.
Our aim is to be as efficient as we possibly can at every single stage of the process, through solid building blocks which include our people and the latest, most efficient technology available.
But it’s also about being really open with our brokers and having great conversations, to try to really understand what they’re trying to achieve, remembering that they’re human beings at the end of the day, and it’s all about building good relationships and having good conversations.
We put a lot of emphasis, in our training, on building our team’s confidence in doing that.
Because, at the end of the day, it’s probably that rapport that helps more than anything to ensure the right outcomes, and therefore it’s possibly the element which motivates and inspires us most of all.
Have you seen an increased volume of calls in recent months, on the back of developments like interest rate volatility and the launch of the Mortgage Charter?
Absolutely! Over the past three months, we saw a 7% increase in inbound calls, and a 6% rise in web chat enquiries, which translates to a phenomenal amount of additional enquiries.
We’re hugely proud of the dedication our team have shown in dealing with those as efficiently as possible, with broker feedback which is consistently in the high 9-out-of-10s. In fact, we’ve won a number of awards over the past year for that service, which we’re even more proud of because they’ve been voted for by brokers themselves.
The biggest volume of those calls has related to product transfers, and people wanting to know what their options are at the end of an existing deal. Then, quite a high proportion have been from brokers asking for guidance on options for people with complex income, like the self-employed and contractors, which perhaps reflects the changing nature of today’s society.
How do you maintain those kinds of service levels amidst the challenging and changing market we’re seeing at the moment?
Our bedrock is really efficient systems and processes, and then the really special ingredient is our hugely motivated and skilled team.
Our telephone BDAs and webchat handlers have the training and criteria knowledge to be able to answer the vast majority of queries immediately and, if they can’t, know exactly who to go to for a fast answer. Coupled with that, they share a floor with our underwriters and senior decision-makers, so if a case comes in which is a bit quirky but they think it’s credible, they can go straight to them to escalate it and try to find a solution.
Our team go out of their way, in every single instance, to try to find a way forward for our clients. However, crucially even where it’s not possible, they’ll get back to them with a rapid ‘no’ so that they know where they stand and can divert their energy into trying to place the case elsewhere instead.
We really are lucky to have a really powerful team spirit, where everyone is pulling in the same direction, and I think that rubs off in our relationships with brokers as well, where we try to get to know them on a personal level and build the kind of strong, supportive, long-term relationships which benefit both us and them.
We invest in that team spirit by running regular fun events and competitions which help lighten the day-to-day pressure everyone inevitably feels as a result of the sheer volume of enquiries coming in.
Is there any advice you’d give to intermediaries in terms of ensuring their cases get prioritised and processed as efficiently as possible?
‘Work smart’ is the short answer. By that I mean take advantage of the efficient, self-service sources of information we have available for the simple queries – like our website and chatbot – and consider whether they really need to engage with an advisor over telephone or webchat.
A high proportion of the enquiries we’re fielding daily are related to fairly mundane things, from checking criteria like our upper age limits to technical issues such as how to reset their access password, all the answers to which can be found via our automated channels.
There’s nothing more disheartening to us than getting on a call with a broker to discover they’ve been waiting 10 minutes during a busy time just to find out something they could have sourced in a matter of seconds themselves.
And the more people take advantage of those, the more time our team also have to get to the more complicated issues faster and improve satisfaction all round.
We really do love talking to our intermediary clients, we just want to make sure we do so when it really counts!
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