How do you get feedback from your borrowers? Follow-up surveys after you close can give you valuable information about your business that can guide its growth. You can also use your surveys to make it easy for borrowers to refer friends and family looking to buy or refinance.
The good news is that you can quickly and easily write surveys that make it easy for you to get feedback — and analyze it to find common strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities to improve.
Here are our top tips.
Use a Free or Low-Cost Tool
Although there are many high-end options for creating and sending surveys, make it easy on yourself by using a free tool such as SurveyMonkey, SoGoSurvey, or ProProfs Survey Maker. These tools allow you to create a survey quickly, send it via email, and track responses. You may end up needing the features that require a paid upgrade, but the free versions should offer enough power and flexibility to get you started.
Keep It Short and Sweet
The shorter your surveys are, the more likely your borrowers will fill them out. Decide what information you need and ask questions that will get you those answers. Don’t waste time on information that would be nice to know but isn’t necessary.
Not sure what information you need to gather? Look at your business and marketing goals to guide you on the critical questions. Here are some example questions to get you started: How satisfied were you with our communication throughout the process? Did I answer all of your questions in a timely manner? Do you prefer asking me questions directly or finding answers to common questions on my website? What information didn’t you find on my website?
The survey platforms also offer easy analysis tools so you can view the data in the way that makes the most sense to you — graphs, individual answers, word clouds, and so on.
Send It Out at the Right Time
Use automated reminders to send out your surveys after an agreed-upon amount of time. At closing, let your borrowers know they’ll receive a survey within a set number of days — and don’t wait too long. You can use your email marketing software to send the link and track whether they open the message. Tags and automation will make this easy. If you set an automation that sends your email with the survey link after two days and adds a specific tag (which you can do when you’re closing out their file on your computer), you will make surveying your borrowers easy.
Don’t be afraid to resend if the message isn’t opened, but don’t spam your borrowers. Send one reminder and then move on.
Don’t Forget to Ask for Referrals
When your borrowers are excited about their new home (or lower mortgage payments in the case of a refinance), use that goodwill to ask for referrals. Consider placing one question about referrals at the end of the survey. Use conditional logic to ensure that respondents who say “no” don’t see further questions, but those who say “yes” get the option to give you a name. (Most survey tools make this easy.) You can also ask them if they’d like to be on your referral list so you can send them ongoing reminders to send their friends and family your way. Offer them gifts for signing up and for receiving a good referral to keep this a fun process for them.
Online survey tools combined with your email marketing system make surveying your borrowers and analyzing the data easy, so you can get the feedback you need to make your business great.