Three Ways Servicers Can Move the Needle on Borrower Experience

J.D. Power’s 2025 U.S. Mortgage Servicer Satisfaction Study reveals a widening gap in borrower satisfaction between mortgage origination and servicing experiences. While originators are scoring higher than ever, mortgage servicers have fallen to an all-time low. According to the study, the widening gap “increasingly comes down to effective communication.”

Most originators have invested in modern borrower experiences, providing seamless, digital-first origination and onboarding processes. Mortgage servicers, always conscious of the bottom line, have not invested in the same way. For a borrower, the servicing experience can feel like they’ve stepped back in time. The communications they receive—letters, statements, and disclosures—are highly regulated and consequently, they’re typically long, complex, and generic, delivered by mail or as static PDFs inside digital portals. This stark contrast undermines trust from day one, reflected in the fact that only 32% of borrowers rate their servicer’s communications favorably.

Low borrower satisfaction carries significant business consequences for servicers. Dissatisfied or confused borrowers are more likely to complain to regulators, generate costly call-center volume, and lengthen loss-mitigation processes.

To meaningfully improve the borrower experience, servicers must modernize communications,  operations, and supporting technology. By focusing on three key areas, servicers can reduce costs, boost efficiency, and deliver the personalized, digital-first experience borrowers expect:

1) Eliminate channel siloes with a centralized hub

According to J.D. Power, borrowers expect flexibility in how they interact and easy access to information. Supporting a wide range of communication channels and letting borrowers choose the ones they prefer is the most straightforward way mortgage servicers can deliver this.

Most servicers don’t, because managing their current fragmented ecosystem is already very complex. Print, email, SMS, and app / portal content often live in separate systems that are managed by different teams or outsourced to third-party providers. This forces maintenance of large amounts of duplicate content and inconsistency. Because adding new channels compounds this complexity, digital transformation has been slow to take hold.

Mortgage servicers leveraging a centralized content hub, where all communications, print and digital, are managed in one place, can eliminate these challenges. Within these platforms, content isn’t tied to channel-specific templates, so it can be reused across channels while being controlled from a single point of change. This means the same content can support traditional composed formats like print and email, as well as dynamic digital experiences such as portals, mobile apps, or chatbots.

This approach not only improves efficiency and reduces cost—it gives servicers the agility to meet borrower’s preferred channel today and quickly adapt as expectations evolve.

2) Accelerate change cycles with business user control

When borrowers need help, they want answers fast—particularly during times of stress and hardship. If they are left waiting too long, trust erodes and the relationship can be damaged irreparably. Similarly, regulators demand fast turns on changes.

The reality is that long communication creation and change cycles severely limit servicers’ responsiveness. Business teams may have a draft ready in days, only to wait weeks, sometimes months, for IT or print vendors to code changes into a legacy system.

Managing communications using a no-code SaaS solution enables business teams to control the process end to end. These tools empower non-technical users to create, update, and implement changes without relying on IT. Leading servicers using these platforms have accelerated change cycles from four to six weeks to as little as one day.

3) Use AI to accelerate plain language and translation

Most servicers send communications packed with mortgage terminology and legalese that confuse many borrowers, particularly those with Limited English Proficiency. When borrowers can’t understand what they’re reading, they’re far more likely to ignore the message, take the wrong action, or call you in frustration—all of which drives up servicing costs.

There are many tactics for making communications clearer: writing to a specific Flesch-Kincaid grade, adopting plain-language principles, or translation into preferred languages. Because most servicers lack the resources to do this in-house—and outsourcing is expensive—they’re rarely done.

AI can now automate much of this work. It can analyze a servicer’s communications library, flag content likely to cause confusion, and provide rewritten alternatives optimized for readability or plain language. AI-based translation tools are now fully capable translations of accurately translating complex, regulated content at scale. AI can also perform accuracy checks to validate that meaning and structure are consistent across all language versions.

Critical to leveraging AI, however, is ensuring it is integrated with your communications management systems. This eliminates the need to reapply formatting, accommodate variable data in the content, and reimplement content after optimization, significantly streamlining the process. These solutions enable communications to be optimized or translated and ready to go in seconds.

Modernizing the borrower experience doesn’t have to add cost or complexity. By centralizing control of communications, empowering business users to manage them, and using AI to make them clearer and more accessible, servicers can reduce cost to serve while strengthening borrower relationships.

Originally published in HousingWire