By Moe Bedard
It’s no secret that loss mitigation departments are notorious for terrible customer service. They treat people like criminals for having financial problems. Over the years I’ve written numerous articles suggesting how loss mitigation departments can improve their customer service. First and foremost these departments desperately need to hire more employees to deal with the record numbers of borrowers in distress. To date, this is not happening as it should. Another suggestion was to provide better training or a more streamlined system of mitigating loss in home loans in loss mitigation departments.
It seems that some lenders are finally getting to the point where they are taking some proactive steps to improve their loss mitigation departments in an interesting way: hiring psychologists to assist, train and select appropriate loss mitigation employees. Today’s Wall Street Journal ran an article about mortgage servicing firms starting to take a better approach to servicing their client’s needs. I hope the trend continues for the sake of American Homeowners.
From the Wall Street Journal:
WESTLAKE, Texas — Mortgage-servicing firms are turning to psychology experts as they tackle a coming wave of borrowers wanting to change the terms of their loans.
As they scramble to hire enough employees to deal with the onslaught, some firms are using psychologists to help them attract the right people to help talk borrowers through potential changes, and hiring from competitors.
They also are paying more attention to psychologically pitch-perfect telephone scripts to use when speaking with customers in an attempt to find a way to change, or modify, terms of a loan to ensure payment and avoid foreclosures.
Moe or anybody,
Can you find one person, JUST ONE, who has been helped by the new Making Home Affordable modification yet?? It has been almost 5 weeks since the plan was announced and nothing has been done so far that I can tell.
Also the new website is ok but I cant find the forum.
Thanks.
What is bad about the new program is that although it encourages banks and borrowers to modify, it is only with a small kickback. Loss mitigation departments don’t have time to sort through all the mortgages. And worst of all, if you don’t have someone representing you, there is no plan in place to ENFORCE the new program. They need to tweak it a bit in my humble opinion. Also it is not fair that only Fannie/Freddie qualifies.
home servicing has my mortgage and they are telling me that they do not have to comply with any ferderal guide lines and they are not willing to help. their advice is “take in borders, or get another job. doesn”t anyone oversee these kinds of companies first franklin was the mortgage holder but i guess they folded