How Long Does It Take Your Mortgage Servicer To Answer & Handle Your Calls?
America’s top consumer finance regulator, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), issued a report today on how 16 mortgage servicers performed for consumers from December 2020 to April 2021. Below are two findings on how long it takes to answer and handle your calls. The stats and regulator influence are both in your favor.
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Average wait times for borrowers calling servicers for help was 2.7 minutes. Two of the 16 servicers were outliers, reporting wait times of 26.5 and 19.31 minutes. Otherwise, a 3-ish minute wait is pretty strong.
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Average time to handle calls ranged from 5.6 to 16.4 minutes. Also good considering the complexity of many borrower hardship scenarios during this pandemic.
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Wait times and resolution times are the things consumers care about most, and if you’re a mortgage borrower — especially one that might be experiencing a hardship — you should know two things:
(1) Mortgage servicers take this stuff WAY seriously, and do care about you. As with all call center-oriented things in your life, it requires some patience on your part, but lenders do want to do the right thing for you. Some of you will disagree, and if so, the CFPB lets you file complaints here.
(2) The CFPB issues reports like this to inform you, but more so to make sure lenders and servicers remain focused and vigilant about serving you. There’s all kinds of language in this report that’s directly speaking to servicers about regs they must follow when serving you, and this is the latest in the CFPB’s active efforts to push servicers to take care of you. This goes right down to the way the CFPB writes their headlines (the first headline linked below is written verbatim as the CFPB wrote it) — even though the data in the report shows servicers are performing for you, the CFPB will keep servicers on their toes with language like this. That’s good for you.
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Reference:
– CFPB Report: Mortgage Servicers’ Pandemic Response Varies Significantly
– Full CFPB report on servicer customer care December 2020 to April 2021