Table of Contents
Audience: Loan Servicer or Collector, Developers, Loan Servicing/Collections Managers, Data
Introduction
In LMS, borrowers and loans are not synonyms. A borrower can have multiple loans, and a loan can have multiple co-borrowers. Most of our labeling options are applied at the loan level—checklists, portfolios, and loan statuses all apply to individual loans, and not the borrowers themselves. If each loan only has one borrower, and each borrower only has one loan, then you don't really need to track customers independently from their accounts. But if you have secondary borrowers attached to loans, or a single customer with several loans, you may need a labeling tool that's specific to customers.
With customer statuses, you can create a custom list of labels that apply to the borrowers themselves.
Use Case: Clojure
Use Case: Customer Status/Clojure
The Problem:
A lender extends several loans to a single borrower, but then that borrower goes active-duty in the armed forces, qualifying for an SCRA adjustment to their interest rate across all of their loans. Instead of just editing one loan, the lender needs to edit several and keep track of which loans still need to be changed. And they'll have a similar problem anytime a borrower has an issue that affects multiple loans, like bankruptcy or retaining an attorney.
LoanPro's Solution:
When borrowers have a problem that affects multiple loans, its best to track that problem on borrower themselves. You could set up customer status as a trigger for automated processes on each of their loans. You could use Rules Applied to create a rule where changing the customer status to “SCRA” would then change the loan status, portfolios, and other loan settings. You could also use customer status as a variable in other areas, like computation fields, trigger-based notifications, or custom forms. Together, these tools let you kick off automated processes on all the customer's loans at once, saving you time and helping you stay compliant.
Use Case: Webhooks
Use Case: Customer Status/Webhooks
The Problem:
Rules Applied is a customizable automation system in LMS that allows you to specify criteria, and when those criteria are met, the system will automatically update the loan with actions you've set up. The list of possible actions is pretty long, but it does have limits. It takes our developers time and effort to add a new action, and they simply can't foresee every possible action that lenders will want to automate. That means that some parts of the software—like customer information—can't be updated with our built-in automation tools.
LoanPro's Solution:
That's one reason why LoanPro built Premium Webhooks, which originated as a notification system to communicate between LMS and other software. Basically, you set up an automatic notification, and when it goes off LMS sends an update to a website that you specify. That can website can be LMS, triggering changes on loans and customers in the software.
Setting up webhooks requires some knowledge and technical expertise, so we recommend you work with our support team.
How Customer Statuses Work
Customer statuses are created at the tenant-level and then applied to individual customers. You'll have a single list of labels that can be placed on individual borrowers. Just like how each loan can only have one loan status, each customer can only have one customer status at a given time.
To use them, you'll start with creating your statuses in the Settings tab. Then, you'll navigate to an individual customer's page and update them with the appropriate status.
Common Questions
Let's answer some common questions about customer status:
- When is it better to use a customer status than a loan status? If you have a single customer with several loans, then you might run into situations—like an SCRA adjustment, bankruptcy, or death—where all of those loans need to be serviced. You can make the customer status a part of your process to ensure all of those loans are serviced correctly.
- How can I update customer statuses more efficiently? If you want to update a large number of statuses at once, you should use a Customer Information Import. You can update customer statuses automatically through Premium Webhooks, sending a PUT request to the customer endpoint. If you're updating customer statuses as well as loan labels (like loan statuses, portfolios, and checklists) you might consider bundling all those changes together in a Process Wizard.
What's Next?
Our article Labeling Types goes over all of our other labeling options, like loan statuses and portfolios. And for a more in-depth break down of how those options compare, check out Comparison of Loan Tagging and Grouping Options.
Written by Andy Morrise
Updated on July 26th, 2023