Servicers Find Less Customer Contact Is Better.

DALLAS -- J.D. Power and Associates found in its 2006 survey that consumers who have less contact with their mortgage servicing company are generally more satisfied with the company's performance than consumers who initiate a lot of contact.

At first that didn't sit well with SunTrust Mortgage, the company that ranked No. 1 in consumer satisfaction among loan servicing customers in last year's J.D. Power survey.

"We were a little surprised and hurt to learn that the less our borrowers heard from us, the happier they were," said Lori Gray, senior vice president for business development at SunTrust Mortgage, during a panel discussion at the SourceMedia Mortgage Servicing Conference here last week.

But SunTrust has learned that the paradox may be a good thing. What consumers want, Ms. Gray said, is "frictionless" loan servicing. They want to have a lender that meets or exceeds their expectations, resolves problems quickly, and bridges the gap between loan origination and loan servicing.

Toward that end, SunTrust allows retail loan origination officers to maintain a kind of ownership over their customers. If a consumer has an issue with the way their loan is being managed, they can call the person they probably know best at SunTrust.

"All of our customers have advocates within the company, and that advocate is their loan originator," Ms. Gray said.

SunTrust prides itself in having a sales-oriented company culture, and the company even has created a "loan officer retention leader board" to reward sales officers who recapture existing mortgage customers who make a new purchase or ...