20 Aug Servicers to Undergo Customer Care Training from Fannie Mae
Mortgage servicers will soon undergo “Know Your Options Customer Care” training from Fannie Mae. The move comes as a way to establish better relationships between lenders and home owners. The program is geared toward servicer call center employees who spend the most time answering questions from concerned and frustrated home owners. The hope is to institute some form of quality control, ensuring that all servicers are delivering consistent customer service.
The program, which has been in development for about a year, aims to establish one central point of contact in the call center. Home owners need to be able to build a relationship with their servicer to better understand foreclosure prevention options. The hope is that this information will be presented in a more clear and understandable format so that home owners who are in jeopardy of losing their homes can make a decision.
Right now, home owners don’t understand what avenues they have to explore, so GSE is now taking other preventative steps to help consumers avoid foreclosures, like launching a new website with educational tools for home owners, reaching out to struggling home owners early, reducing the timeline for short sales, and opening new Mortgage Help Centers in hard-hit areas.
The “Know Your Options Customer Care” program will include training sessions and a script that will better facilitate interaction with home owners. Fannie Mae has already implemented the program with 18 of its largest servicers, and those who have participated in the training say they have a 20-30% increase in workouts with their home owners.
Adds Leslie Peeler, SVP of Fannie Mae’s National Servicing Organization, “What we’ve learned through the housing crisis is that if everybody takes the responsibility to work together and act early, then we can prevent foreclosures and keep families in their homes in many cases. We want our servicers to be trusted counselors to their customers, from attentively collecting documents to advising them of their options and guiding them through the process.”