How we sped up our service levels
Written by Luke Stevenson
by Lauren Eaton, Head of Lending Operations
While the pressures of the past year may have prompted lenders to conceal their service levels as processing times felt the crunch of pent-up demand following lockdown, the Buy-to-Let lending team at LendInvest has approached it differently.
For our Buy-to-Let product, we’ve published new figures weekly so that brokers and their clients knew what to expect when working with us, whatever the figures showed.
Since the start of the new year, we’ve seen key metrics improve, the time to offer fell considerably; and to top it off, March was a record month for Buy-to-Let business for LendInvest. Here’s how the team did it.
Where we were and where we are
Due to increased volumes our packaging turnaround times at the start of the year were around 3 days.
On top of that our valuer capacity was stretched with some areas taking nearly 2 weeks to carry out inspections and return reports. Our offer times also took a hit with the Underwriters working 10 days behind usual SLAs.
From this point the team has worked tirelessly to restore business as usual. Packaging is being actioned the same day, and providing we have all the required information underwriters are producing offers the same day as the valuation report is received.
Valuers are also now working to their usual SLAs averaging 5 days from instruction to receipt of report.
See our Buy-to-Let service levels here.
How we improved it
The sheer volume of cases was a challenge for the team. With the pressure of the stamp duty holiday due to end at the end of March it meant we had to work hard to get through the backlog of cases, while providing a good service to our brokers.
We wanted our experienced case managers and underwriters to focus on packaging and producing offers. So we hired some administrators to assist with answering phones and ensuring brokers were being provided with updates they needed. We also implemented automated standard updates so brokers knew where their cases were in the process.
Internally, we focused on delivering technology and automation to help speed up the process.
Working closely with our tech team we quickly established the pain points within our internal processes and delivered integrations and automation to assist with the packaging process.
By building out rules to help identify areas that needed attention within the application, our team was able to deal with those early in the process to allow time for brokers to provide any additional information while the valuation takes place.
This has allowed us to produce offers quickly and tweak our credit criteria where we saw particular trends and hold ups.
The technology that’s improving our Buy-to-Let speed to offer
Keeping it going
To get back to a healthy position with our service levels we have improved our working processes in a way that will keep driving improvements, with the tech enhancements making it easier for our team to deal with higher volumes so they should be more resilient in future.
Further technology and team investments will continue to drive down the time it takes to offer Buy-to-Let deals.