Adopting AI and Automation to Transform User Experiences and Company Workflows – WEBINAR RECAP

The transformational impact of evolving technology of America’s $14 trillion servicing industry has been a long time coming, and Erica Sands (Sagent’s Sr. Director, Product Management) product-driven, and consumer-focused mindset has been a key asset to the team, helping bring to market our latest platform, Dara. Her skillset is crucial as she relentlessly works to develop products that disrupt the lending & financial industry by automating processes end-to-end and helping customers solve challenging problems, even before they arise.  

Given her astounding expertise, she was recently asked to join a webinar hosted by AI Core Spot focused on the topic of how emerging technology, like AI integrated products, can be harnessed to improve efficiency and customer experiences throughout the mortgage servicing lifecycle. First, we’ll introduce the panelists, then we’ll get into the gritty details: 

Those who joined Erica on the panel were: 

• Elan Paneerselvam, Chief Data & Analytics Officer Consumer Credit and Senior Director at Ally 

• Deepak Vij, Senior Vice President of AI, software architecture and engineering at Newrez LLC 

Now, the good stuff. 

Integrating AI into a Pre-existing Workflow 

To begin the panel, Erica provided her perspective on bringing AI into a company, and what use cases she would recommend companies look at when they are considering to integrate AI. Erica emphasized that the first step in this process is to understand the AI’s capabilities and how this technology can be best leveraged to push forward a company’s success. She explained: 

The best way to do this is to create a small team within your organization that their focus is looking at what AI tools are available? Is your goal to augment operational processes within your org? Or when you dig into use cases: should you build an AI tool for a specific need?

Once you’ve confirmed that the AI tool can solve the potential problem, Erica encourages a “build vs. buy” analysis. This means determining if there is an existing tool can be used to fill the need or if a brand new tool would be the better, more efficient route leading you down the ‘build’ path of Erica’s analysis. When Sagent was using this analysis tool to figure out a better outcome on delivering a solution to the servicing space, we took the lead on developing brand new platform that leverages AI to increase efficiencies across the entire loan lifecycle launching Dara, the first end-to-end mortgage servicing platform 

Meet the Customer Where They Are..with Automation + AI 

Deepak Vij said the customer is the most important factor and keeping the customer at the center of the company’s focus is an integral part of success. Erica echoed Deepak’s comments and stressed the importance of understanding and meeting the customer where they are. She added, 

It is also trying to meet what the customer wants, they want self-serve, they want to be able to figure it out on their own and only have to contact and speak to a person when they’ve hit a block and they actually need help.

Using AI to Improve Staff Efficiency 

Elan Paneerselvam discussed the opportunity for AI integrated technologies to reduce cost, increase efficiency and improve the customer experience. Erica agreed and shared her belief that there are more opportunities than just direct use by the consumer. When it comes to what we’re doing here at Sagent with Dara, the platform uses AI to streamline workflows and increase efficiencies, saving servicers time, while reducing operational costs.  

Erica emphasized the scope of opportunity to use AI chatbots to improve human-based customer service, in addition to offering chatbots to consumers to answer simple questions. Another way that Erica thinks generative-AI can be used within an organization to improve efficiency is work prioritization. She said,  

You can optimize task allocation so ensuring the most efficient use of resources and minimizing wait times for your users and your organization by allocating the work through factors and attributes instead of manual allocation through a person.

Panelists agreed that looking at the entire scope of the AI field can be overwhelming, and the key to mitigate that is to take small steps to integrating the technology into your organization and consumer experience to build an understanding of AI. After building a foundation of understanding, it’s less of a challenge to engage in the more exciting and innovative tools of AI that are available. 

Erica knows that emerging technologies like chatbots and other AI tools are not anything to be afraid of; moreover, it’s time to embrace these technologies and use them to improve consumer experiences and employee efficiency–innovation that Sagent has already embraced.