In lending, communication with your customers is critical to your success. A communication strategy, if well-planned and well-executed, can be the difference between borrowers missing payments and borrowers paying off their loans in full.

LoanPro's Base Communications Suite lets you create personalized email campaigns and integrate with your preferred SMS and direct mail tools using Advanced Connections. You can also add on our Interactive SMS and Smart Mail House tools, bringing all your communication tools into one system. By keeping everything under the same roof, agents can work more efficiently without needing to switch between multiple platforms. To learn more about these tools, see our Interactive SMS and Smart Mail House articles. Continue reading to learn how the Base Communications Suite supports an effective communication strategy for your lending business.

Email

The email tool lets you send emails to any customer or group of customers, automatically personalized to each recipient. You can also save the emails you compose as templates for future use. 

Setting up the email tool

LoanPro uses an integration with Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) to facilitate email correspondence. By default, your emails get sent through LoanPro's Amazon SES account. Even though the email is sent through LoanPro, you can make it look like they are coming from your email address. In order to do this, addresses must first be verified by Amazon SES or your email provider. To verify your email addresses:

• Navigate to Settings > Company > Emails > Email Addresses. 
• To add an address, click the ‘Add’ button in the upper right. Click the Select the category of the email you entered from the dropdown on the left. Enter the email address in the field provided. Click the “Save” button in the upper right to save the email address.
• Click the “Verify In Connections” button in the ‘Connections Status’ column to verify the address. 

• If you have more than one email address entered, you can click the key icon to set the email address as primary.

To check if your LMS tenant is associated with a valid Connections account, navigate to Settings > Company > Plugins > Connections. From there, you can check that the email function is enabled by navigating to the ‘Services’ tab. If it is not, enable it. 

If you would like to use your own email application rather than LoanPro’s Amazon SES account, you can configure it through Connections. This option is available through either SMTP or SES. If you have chosen to use SMTP, check the configuration to make sure it's accurate. To do this, first click the edit icon for the email service. Select SMTP from the dropdown and review your configuration. It should include three pieces of information:

• Host: This is the URL of the SMTP server used by your email service.
• User: This is most often the email address you use through this service.
• Password: This is the password associated with the user.

If you are using your own SES account for email, the process is the same, except SES should be selected from the dropdown. Now verify that the Access Key Id and Secret Access Key are correct for your SES account. If you make any changes, click ‘Save’.

Composing emails

To compose an email, navigate to Tools > Customer Communication > Email. If you have loaded accounts into the email tool, you will see a button at the top right of the email area. Click this button to compose the email.

To create a new email, choose one of your linked email addresses from the 'From' dropdown menu. When the email is received, it will look as though it came from this email address. Simply add a subject into the subject field, use the text box to write and format the email content, and click send when finished.

Variables

You can also use context engine variables to write an email, pulling information specific to each recipient and account. You can access these variables by clicking the 'Help variables' link at the top right of the text box. Use the search field to search for the variable you want to use. Once you have found the variable you want, click the hyperlink to insert it into your email. 

Saving emails

You have the option to save your email as a reusable email form. To view the email form options, click the green ‘Email forms’ dropdown button at the top left of the Compose Email box. Below the email form options in the dropdown are the names of your existing email forms. 

The available options include:

• Save as new. Save the email you composed as a new form. You will need to enter a title for the form in the 'Title' field. Once you've chosen a title for your new email form, click 'Save'.
• Manage saved forms. View a list of the email forms you've saved.  Use the eyeball and red trash can icons to the right of each form to view and delete.
• Existing email forms. Below the white line on the dropdown menu, click the title of an existing email form to load the template.

Addressing emails

There are three ways you can compile your email recipient list:

• Manually selecting a group of accounts from the Account Manager
• Sending an email from within an individual account
• Setting up automated emails 

Manual bulk campaign

This method requires you to add customers from the loan list. Navigate to Loans > New Account Manager inside your company account. Search for the loans that have customers you want to email. After you've completed your search, select 'Send Email’ from the loan actions dropdown menu in the top right of the Account Manager page. Selecting this option will create a list of loans based on your search parameters that will be included in the list of recipients. Once you click this option, you will be taken to Tools > Customer Communication > Email  to complete the email process.

 

 

Individual message

You can also add recipients to an email list through the Loan Summary page. After selecting the loan you'd like to include on the email list, navigate to 'Customer' to see the customer's contact information. On the Customer Summary page, click the email icon below a loan ID. Clicking the customer's listed email address will add that email to the list. After you have selected the accounts you would like to email, navigate to Tools > Customer Communication > Email to complete the email process.

 

 

Do-not-disturb settings

To make sure your emails go out at the right times, LoanPro lets you specify windows when emails will not get sent to your borrowers. These windows will apply to all loans and customers. They are based on each borrower's own time zone, so they’ll work for borrowers across different regions.

To set up do-not-disturb times, navigate to Settings > Company > Emails > Do Not Disturb Settings. You can create a number of do-not-disturb settings, allowing you to set up multiple windows when emails won't send.  

To create a new do-not-disturb setting, click the ‘Add’ button in the top right corner. Use the buttons and options on the left to specify the days when emails should not be sent to the borrowers. Enter a start and end time for the do-not-disturb period in the ‘Start Time’ and ‘Stop Time’ fields and then click ‘Save’. You can set as many specific do-not-disturb periods as you need.

Advanced Connections

LoanPro’s Advanced Connections are customizable webhooks that create connections between two programs over the web. They facilitate seamless integration with external systems. This automation extends the functionality of your existing tools, while ensuring adherence to regulatory standards. The following will explain how to set up a webhook in LoanPro. 

Advanced connections can be sent based on events and triggers.

Determine method and callback URL

Regardless of the type of webhook, you will need to determine the method and callback URL. Enter the URL you want to call into the 'Callback URL' field. This is the URL that you tell your webhook to send information to. This field can even include LoanPro's context engine variables, and here's an example of what that may look like:

https://loanpro.simnang.com/api/public/api/1/odata.svc/Loans([[v('loan-id')]]) 

When the webhook is sent, the loan ID variable will be replaced by the ID of the loan that fits the criteria for the webhook. 

You can select between four method types: GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE. Of those options, GETs, PUTs, and DELETEs are a webhook feature that incur costs.

Authenticate your webhook

This step is optional, but authentication requirements will depend on where you plan to send the webhook. There are two available options to authenticate:

• Tokens: Tokens provide greater security from DDoS attacks and allow you to protect yourself from unwanted webhook requests. We recommend using tokens with your webhooks as an added layer of defense and security. If the URL you're sending a LoanPro webhook to uses a simple authentication token, paste the token into the 'Authorization Token' field. If desired, you can also generate a new token here and copy it to the receiving system.
• Custom headers: This allows you to list the header parameters that a receiving system uses. This is useful if you're sending your webhook to an API, as most APIs use more than one authorization field to authenticate requests. The webhooks feature will allow up to 25 fields. Using custom headers is a webhook feature that incurs costs.

Set webhook retry settings

Retries are sent when a webhook fails to reach its desired destination. A retry will be attempted if LoanPro does not receive any response at all after 45 seconds. You can set up to 50 retry attempts and determine how much time the system will wait between sending the next request. You can also set your webhook to send no retry attempts at all.

Enter the payload

Lastly, you'll want to enter the variables that will be sent as part of the webhook notification when the event occurs. You'll notice that there are two text boxes here. 

The first section allows you to select which LoanPro variables to include in the webhook. To view and add variables, click the 'Help Variables' button. You will only need to enter the variable names (e.g. status-amount-due) and separate listed variables by commas. When you are done, click 'Save'. When the webhook is sent, the variables here will be sent in a JSON format.

The second section is the ‘Custom Body Formatting’ box. This section allows you to send the payload in any format you'd like. This is a webhook feature that incurs costs, but it's useful if you'd like to use a webhook to send a specific payload to an API. If you plan on sending custom formatted payloads, you’ll need to ensure the system catching the webhook accepts the format you use. If necessary, update your custom headers to accept the payload you use. 

Once you've added information to all sections of the webhooks page, simply hit 'Save' to add your webhook.