Low customer satisfaction has significant business implications for mortgage lenders. Dissatisfied or confused borrowers are more likely to complain to regulators, generate costly call center volumes and prolong loss mitigation processes. by J.D. Power Satisfaction survey of American mortgage servicers from 2025 reveals a widening gap in borrower satisfaction between origination and service experiences. While borrowers are happier than ever with originators, they are less satisfied than ever with servicers. According to the research, the widening gap “increasingly comes down to effective communication.”
Most originators have invested in modern lending experiences, providing seamless, digital-first origination and onboarding processes. Managers, who are always aware of the end result, have not invested in the same way. For a borrower, the servicing experience can feel like stepping back in time. The communications they receive (letters, statements, disclosures) are highly regulated and therefore long, complex and generic, delivered by post or as static PDFs in digital portals. This stark contrast undermines trust from day one, reflected in the fact that only about a third of borrowers rate their service providers’ communications positively.
To meaningfully improve the borrower experience, servicers must prioritize modernizing their communications and the technology that supports them. To reduce costs, increase efficiency, and deliver personalized, digital experiences that borrowers expect, consider these key areas:
- Accelerate change cycles with control over business users
When borrowers need help, they want answers quickly, especially during times of stress and hardship. If they wait too long, trust will erode and the relationship can be irreparably damaged. In the same way, regulators demand a rapid turnaround time for changes.
The reality is that long communication and change cycles severely limit the responsiveness of service providers. Business teams can have a draft ready in days, only to have to wait weeks, sometimes months, for IT or print vendors to code the changes into a legacy system.
By allowing business teams to control the process from start to finish, non-technical users can create, update and deploy changes without being dependent on IT timelines. This can cause change cycles to accelerate from four to six weeks to just one day.
- Eliminate channel silos with a centralized hub
According to JD Power, borrowers expect flexibility in the way they interact and easy access to information. Supporting a wide range of communication channels and letting borrowers choose which ones they prefer is the simplest way mortgage servicers can achieve this.
Most service providers don’t do that because managing their current fragmented ecosystem is already complex. Print, email, SMS and app/portal content often reside in separate systems managed by different teams or outsourced to third-party providers. This forces the maintenance of large amounts of duplicate content and inconsistency. Because adding new channels adds to this complexity, digital transformation is slow to get underway.
Mortgage servicers who use a centralized content center, where all print and digital communications are managed in one place, can eliminate these challenges. Within these platforms, content is not tied to channel-specific templates, so it can be reused across channels and managed from a single point of change. This means that the same content can support traditional curated formats such as print and email, as well as dynamic digital experiences such as portals, mobile apps or chatbots.
This approach not only improves efficiency and reduces costs, but also gives servicers the flexibility to meet borrowers’ preferred channel today and quickly adapt as expectations evolve.
- Use AI to accelerate plain language and translation
Most servicers send messages full of mortgage terminology and legalese that confuse many borrowers, especially those with limited English proficiency. When borrowers don’t understand what they read, they are much more likely to ignore the message, take the wrong action, or call their service provider in frustration, all of which drives up service costs.
There are many tactics to make communication clearer: writing according to accepted readability standards, adopting plain language principles, or translation into preferred languages. Because most service providers do not have the resources to do this internally (and outsourcing is expensive), this is rarely done.
AI can now automate much of this work. It can analyze a servicer’s communications library, flag content likely to cause confusion, and provide rewritten alternatives optimized for readability or plain language. AI-based translation tools are now fully capable of accurately translating complex, regulated content at scale. AI can also perform accuracy checks to validate that meaning and structure are consistent across language versions.
Crucial to leveraging AI, however, is ensuring it integrates with your communications management systems. This eliminates the need to reapply formatting, include variable data in content, and redeploy content after optimization, significantly streamlining the process. This strategy makes it possible to optimize or translate communications and be ready to use within seconds.
Modernizing the lending experience doesn’t have to add cost or complexity. By enabling business users to manage communications in a centralized content hub and using AI to make them clearer and more accessible, service providers can reduce service costs while strengthening relationships with borrowers.
Patrick Kehoe is Executive Vice President of Product Management at Messagepoint.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of HousingWire’s editorial staff and its owners. To contact the editor responsible for this piece: [email protected].
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