Automated client updates for mortgage brokers

The complaint clients make about brokers is almost never about the recommendation. It is about not knowing what was happening. Weeks pass between submission and offer, the client has no visibility into the lender's queue, and silence gets interpreted as neglect.

Scheduled updates fix that. Done badly they create a second problem, where the client receives a stream of messages that plainly nobody wrote and learns to ignore all of them. The difference between the two outcomes is mostly in what the messages say.

Map the case, then decide what deserves a message

Start by listing every point in a case where the status genuinely changes. For a purchase that is roughly: decision in principle issued, full application submitted, valuation instructed, valuation returned, underwriting queries raised, offer issued, solicitor instructed, searches back, exchange, completion.

Now mark which of those the client learns about from someone else. If the estate agent tells them the valuation happened, you telling them two days later is not news, it is noise. If the solicitor is already updating them on searches, stay out of it.

What is left is your territory, and it is usually smaller than expected: submission, valuation instructed, valuation returned, offer, and anything that goes wrong.

The discipline of cutting the list is what stops updates becoming background hum. Five meaningful messages across a twelve-week case will be read. Twenty will not.

Say something, not nothing

The characteristic failure of an automated update is that it contains no information. "Your application is progressing" tells the reader precisely what they knew before opening it, and it is the sentence that teaches people not to bother next time.

An update earns its place if it contains at least one of three things: something that has happened, something that will happen next, or something the client needs to do.

Compare "your case is with the lender" against "the lender received the application on Tuesday and has instructed the valuation. Their current turnaround for this is around a week, and I will let you know the moment it comes back. Nothing needed from you." The second is barely longer and does the whole job.

Where you can, include the actual date something happened and the actual expected window, drawn from your case data rather than written into the template as a generality. Specifics are what make a message feel written for one person.

The waiting message

The hardest case is when nothing has happened for a fortnight, which is exactly when the client is most anxious.

Firms usually respond by saying nothing, on the grounds that there is nothing to say. That is the wrong instinct. A short message that names the wait is far better than silence: what stage the case is at, how long it has been there, what the current expectation is, and confirmation that you are watching it.

This one is worth writing carefully and reusing, because it is the message that most often prevents a call to the office, and it is the one that most often prevents a client concluding you have forgotten them.

Wording that does not grate

A few specific habits separate updates that read as a person from updates that read as a system.

• Come from an adviser, with their name and their direct contact details, not from a firm-wide address that goes nowhere.
• Use the property address or the lender name where you can. "Your application with Nationwide for the flat on Clifton Road" is instantly personal in a way that "your case" is not.
• Cut the throat-clearing. No "we are delighted to inform you", no "please be advised". Start with the fact.
• Match the channel to the message. A milestone is fine by email. Something urgent is a phone call. A very short confirmation can be a text if the client has agreed to that.
• Do not send at antisocial hours. Hold overnight sends until the morning.
• Never send an automated congratulation before you have checked the thing being congratulated actually happened. A message celebrating an offer that turns out to be a conditional one is a memorable way to lose trust.

Where the sequence has to stop

Any case with a problem in it comes off the schedule entirely.

A down-valuation, a decline, an underwriter asking for something awkward, a chain collapse. These need a call, and any scheduled message that fires in the middle of them will land badly. Build the suppression rule when you build the sequence, because it will not occur to anyone to add it later.

The same applies to clients who have told you they are unwell, bereaved or in financial difficulty. Consumer Duty expects communications to be shaped around customers' needs, and a client in that position should be on an adviser's personal list rather than a schedule.

Check what it actually looks like

Once a quarter, take one completed case and read every automated message that client received, in order, as though you were them.

You will usually find one of three things: a stretch of silence at a point that felt long, two messages that said the same thing, or a sentence that made sense to whoever wrote the template but not to a person receiving it in isolation.

Fix those three and the sequence improves more than it would from any amount of tooling. The wording is the product here. The automation is only the delivery mechanism.

The underlying point

Clients do not object to being messaged by a system. They object to being messaged by a system that has nothing to say. Get the content right and almost nobody asks, or cares, how the message was sent.