Introduction

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.

Highlights

LoanPro provides ways to easily communicate with your customers through email, SMS text, automated phone calls, and Smart Mail House Communications. The customer communication tools also allow you to create billings statements and custom forms for your borrowers.

You can communicate with individual borrowers or in bulk. You can also set up automatic messages that the system will send out after a loan event, or when the loan matches a custom-made trigger.

Using LoanPro’s tools to communicate with your customers makes communication easier, and it keeps a record of the communication that occurs.

Where Does Customer Communication Fit? 

Customer communication is one aspect of servicing loans. The means you use to communicate with borrowers will depend on a few factors. First, the loan amount and interest rates will determine how urgent any given communication is and how much money is a reasonable expenditure for a given message. When you're dealing with an account worth tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, a 58¢ postage stamp is pretty palatable—not the case with a Buy Now, Pay Later loan where the whole payoff is $100.

Federal and state (or provincial) laws may also rule out some forms of communication. For instance, the CFPB's Small-Dollar Rule stipulates that borrowers may opt out of electronic communication at any time, and that some information must be sent in retainable mediums like a letter or downloadable file.

Lastly, lenders should pay attention to what methods yield the best results. Different clientele may have different reactions to each communication type. Some borrowers will put mail in a neat stack with their other bills to be paid on time; others will cram it someplace and forget about it until a week or two after the payment was due.

This Feature is Not 

One thing we should clear up:

• Smart Mail House Communications, Custom Forms, and Emails do not use the same templates. Saving a template in Custom Forms won't save it in Smart Mail House Communications or Email, and vice versa. They do, however, use the same context variables, so you could copy the text or HTML from one and paste it to another.
• Customer communication methods aren't the exact same as notification methods. But there is a lot of overlap. With our automated notification tools, Event-based and Trigger-Based Notifications, you can send SMS, emails, and mail, as well as system notifications and webhooks.

What’s Next?

With the basics out of the way, you're ready to learn the specifics about individual communication tools:

• Email Tool
• SMS Text Tool
• Run TCN Campaign
• Smart Mail House Communications – Basics
• Custom Forms 101 

You might also be interested in automating communication with Event-based and Trigger-Based Notifications.