How CLS became more efficient in processing whilst completing 10% more business using Nivo

CLS has long been at the forefront of delivering innovation in mortgages that the rest of the market then follows. We were delighted to get the opportunity to work with MD Clayton Shipton and his team to rapidly deploy Nivo with some fantastic results.

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The challenge

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CLS deals with a high volume of inquiries and like any mortgage broker they have a lot of documentation to collect: ID, proof of address, proof of income and expenditure, affordability, home information, etc. must be in place.

Historically, CLS primarily used email to gather what they needed. Long email threads would attempt to capture data, documentation, and evidence with the applicants. It was slow and unreliable. Emails were getting lost in applicants’ inboxes and they were forgetting about them. The quality of the information received was often poor with fingers covering photos and files that needed to be converted. It was expensive and time-consuming to coordinate.

CLS knew that phone-based messaging would be a far more effective way to engage applicants and get information rapidly at their convenience. When the pandemic hit in March 2020, CLS used the time to reflect on internal processes and sought solutions that would innovate the way they did business.

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The results

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In the last 18 months, Nivo has been a great success for CLS. We compiled a few of the highlights below:

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Administration:
‍CLS lost four good admin people to new start-ups in the city and we’ve not replaced them. They have not replaced them because the admin team is not inundated with clients chasing for updates or returning calls for an update. The Nivo app is now completing that workload.

Clayton explained, “Typically, an admin person probably did about 20-30 cases and now they’ve got 50-60 cases. CLS is doing a lot of higher value with admin costs at the lowest they’ve been in 2 or 3 years.”

Speed:
Pre-Nivo, CLS spoke to a customer at 9am in the morning and if they were interested, in best-case scenario, they’d get the documents across with a Decision in Principle, and become qualified the following morning. Now we can complete this process within an hour on the same day.

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Efficiency:
CLS converted an increase of 10% more business since using Nivo. This speaks not only to how quickly it speeds things up but also the additional personal touchpoints the CLS team has implemented for their customers, including planting trees at the point of signature and sending birthday messages.

Client Satisfaction:
On the App Store, CLS has seen an increase in positive customer reviews, people love the simplicity and speed at which this process is now possible.

“I was struggling with a broker who had a much cheaper fee. The response was slow and I had about 5 declined AIP applications. As soon as I spoke to CLS, they came back within half an hour with an AIP. They get straight to the point, are consistently in contact with updates, would call me back whenever I needed to get in touch, and were very helpful with any concerns and worries I had.” CLS Review

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The solution CLS needed

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CLS’ customer base is often busy working people. After a long shift, they don’t want to sift through piles of paperwork to find the necessary information, convert these into PDFs and try and upload them into an email. Often they wouldn’t have easy access to a desktop computer but almost all have access to a smartphone.

When CLS engaged Nivo they were looking for a solution that covered a few crucial things:

- Enabling the CLS team to collect documents quicker
- House the documents in one area
- Accessible for a non-tech-savvy laptop user, with a smartphone

Nivo took the time to get to know our business, and more specifically what we wanted to achieve and why it is important to us.

“Sarah [Head of Customer Success] was really good, she came down from Manchester and said
’What do you want?’
Normally you sit down and say I want a, b, c and they say yes they can and they don’t deliver.
But literally, we said ‘can you do x, can you do y, can you do z?’
Sarah said ‘yes, all capable’, and went away and built it all for us.”

The Nivo solution:

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CLS intuitively uses Nivo as a channel of communication for their customers that not only speeds up the mortgage process but also builds a personalised experience that leads to loyal advocacy.

Key Nivo features:

1. Document collection
2. Automated chasers
3. E-signature
4. Automated real-time updates
5. Chat functionality
6. Security
7. Implementation support

In the last few years, there has been an increase in companies acquiring technology to complete each of the functions mentioned above. However, CLS did not want to bombard customers with elements from numerous technology providers. Part of the Nivo attraction is that everything is under one roof. When combined with CLS’ Salesforce platform it has become a market-leading technology capability for mortgage brokers.

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Future:

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The relationship that we have built with Nivo will continue to grow.

As far as the next steps for the project, CLS will be expanding their CRM integration with Salesforce and moving towards the complete redundancy of email. There’s also interest in leveraging Nivo’s ID document scanning and facial recognition and open banking capabilities more.