If you can’t see, smell, taste or feel something, how do you judge it?
Many colleges and universities are working to figure out this exact problem when it comes to evaluating lenders based on their customer service. As the pricing differences of FFELP loans has become “vanilla” in many scenarios, customer service has certainly become the center of attention with many institutions.
So how do you measure it? Will lender responses to questions typically used in the past, or a third-party scoring model, accurately represent the specific customer service experience that your school desires from a lender? Or might there be another way?
During previous years, colleges and universities worked to quantify customer service items like abandonment rates and the amount of toll-free numbers a lender offered. For some, however, this method did not produce the anticipated results in the level of customer service that they received from their lenders. The answers received did not reflect the 08-09 actual customer service experience of schools and borrowers. Many schools had a goal in mind of reducing the amount of time spent on loan processing through great customer service. Instead, many found that lenders in general fell short of providing the customer service experience that schools had come to expect in previous years.
We believe that we can now help you with this issue! And this same process could be used by your students when they make their own determination on a lender to work with.
For the past year, T.H.E. has been working on a new concept to judge a lender based on customer service. Using an approach less numbers-oriented and more tailored to your experiences, it’s designed around the specific needs of your financial aid office and your students.
If your institution is currently looking for a new way to evaluate a lender’s customer service, please feel free to give your School Relations Director a call for more information. If you are unsure whom to contact regarding this program, please send an e-mail to sales@theloanprogram.org and someone from our team will get back to you.