I recently had an interesting customer experience with my mortgage lender. Ok, I know the experience was with the individual in the call center, but that experience was designed by someone in the CEM department, or whatever they call it, and it was also a huge failure.

While making my June mortgage payment on line through my bank for my rental unit, I inexplicitly switched two numbers and sent the payment $90 short. A week later I received a notice that I was two months behind in payments. Knowing I sent the payment, I checked the status on my banking site…yep, there it was. Sent, cleared and $90 short.

Last week, before leaving town, I called my lender to double check the amount owed before hitting the send button. The amount totaled two months plus a late fee. I was confused as I was only $90 short plus the full amount for July. The representative said that no amount is applied when an amount less than the full amount is sent….something I did not know and an expectation they never set.

What was clearly a typo on my part (two numbers transposed) was considered non-payment by them. Interesting…and infuriating. I indicated I would send July’s mortgage plus the coverage and asked if she would waive the late fee. She said she did not have the power to do that and would need to transfer me.

Then she asked if I lived in the home.

ME: “NO, it is a rental.”  (I could visualize her reading her script….if no, go to question 89. If also a rental, go to question 122.)

HER: “Do you plan to keep it and continue making payments?”

I thought to myself, what? Of course. But I said “why do you ask”?

Stumped. There was no script directive for that answer. She had no idea why she was asking. All she knew was that the when dealing with late payments on rental units she should ask if the intention is to keep the mortgage or not. Ok, I get it. The company is trying to foresee any foreclosures or bankruptcies for obvious reasons: they too have been hit hard over the last two years.

This is CEM gone wrong. I was insulted they insinuated I may be attempting to “walk away” from my responsibilities. The goal was to get a feel for if a customer is going to “walk away” but the result was making a perfectly happy customer angry. That is not a customer-centric (sorry Shevlin) company. It is a company-centric organization interested in covering their assets at all costs.

They set the protocol to ask a question, but did not empower the employee to stray from the script and engage me in informational dialogue that would have streamlined the process. I should also mention, the next day, I received a phone call from the collections department trying to make good on two months of payments. I told the guy to read the notes in their fancy CRM system and hung up.

Aside from re-creating the entire process and empowering and trainging their employees, how could this have been handled better? For starters, they could have been truly customer focused, and instead of a letter and an insulting phone call, they could simply have called and said the following:

Ms. Gore, it appears you have transposed two numbers in your payment amount. Would you like to pay the shortage now, or simply apply it to your next payment?

Problem averted and customer, employee and company aligned.

PS some BPM work would not hurt either. 😉