Customer Engagement

5 Strategies for Journey Success

5 mins read
December 1, 2021
By
Total Expert

By Jake Pniewski, CRM Marketing Manager, Finance of America Mortgage

Winner of Total Expert’s Journey Wiz Expy award

Total Expert’s Journey Creator is an incredibly powerful tool for building personal relationships with customers. And like any powerful tool, they’re most effective when you know what you’re doing. Here are five Journey strategies that anyone can use to make life easier for loan officers and keep customers engaged.

1. Don’t Treat Journeys Like Drip Campaigns

I’ve seen a lot of Journeys essentially built as drip campaigns – very linear. But that almost never delivers what customers want, which is an experience that is affected by their input.

Total Expert’s Journeys make that kind of decision-based marketing possible. In Journeys, you can use if-then statements: if a customer clicks here, they’ll go down one path; if they click somewhere else, they’ll go down another.

Every customer’s financial journey is unique and should be treated as such. Creating Journeys that have branches lets you deliver relevant, one-to-one information, which is how you build relationships.

2. Aim for Conversational

Of course, the content of those branching emails matters a lot. I’ve had the greatest success with emails that look and sound like they’re coming from a loan officer. These plain-text, conversational messages drive much more engagement than emails filled with graphics and images that look like they come from a corporate entity. They’re also more likely to win buy-in from your organization’s loan officers, which is key to translating great content and relevant Journeys into impact.

3. Make Journeys Flexible

Another way I’ve found to win LO buy-in is to make Journeys flexible.

When I first got to Finance of America Mortgage, we were creating custom Journeys for individual LOs, which amounted to over 225 Journeys in the system. Why? Because the Journeys that had been created weren’t flexible enough for LOs to adapt to their needs.

I’m currently working to streamline our library down to 15 Journeys with content blocks that LOs can quickly swap out and personalize.

4. Get Buy-In from LO Assistants and Branch Marketing Managers

Effective Journeys will help you get LO buy-in because great Journeys translate to great results – and that’s what LOs want.

But how do you convince a busy loan officer to learn how to run Journeys? My recommendation: focus on training and winning over LO assistants and branch marketing managers.

They’re often the ones actually managing communications, so if they understand the ins and outs of the platform and the Journeys you’re building, they’ll be able to field any questions or concerns LOs have.

5. Don’t Get Overwhelmed

With any new software – and certainly with a system as powerful as Total Expert – it’s easy to get overwhelmed. My advice: keep exploring.

You won’t design perfect Journeys in a single day, but that’s not the goal. The most effective Journeys will be living things that you’ll modify over time as you learn what resonates with customers and as your offerings and the market change.

One of the beautiful things about Total Expert is that it makes on-the-fly changes possible in a way that other platforms simply don’t. The more you explore, the more you’ll discover.

In 2022, Journeys Will Matter More than Ever

The last two years have been good for many mortgage lenders. But interest rates are expected to go up in 2022. Your marketing messages – what you say, how you say it, when you say it, etc. – will matter even more.

Total Expert is an incredibly flexible platform. It’s exactly the right tool to help financial institutions nurture and build relationships with customers, given what we expect from the market next year.

To do that, you’ll have to spend some time getting to know the platform so you can understand when to work “in the box” and finding ways to think outside the box. Taking that time will be well worth the effort. You’ll be able to move your whole organization forward, keep customers engaged, and create customers for life.

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AI is no longer a future state—it’s already here, embedded in everything from ride-sharing apps and food service to factories and farms. In the world of financial services, though, this ubiquity comes with pressure to integrate AI fast, appear innovative, and keep up with competitors—all while being mindful of evolving federal and state compliance requirements. Moving fast without a plan or awareness of up and downstream implications often leads to AI-enabled solutions that either underdeliver or don’t deliver at all.

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AI that thinks and adapts: Welcome to agentic AI

Let’s make one thing clear: not all AI is created equal.  

Chatbots have been commonplace in financial services for a decade now, but remain rigid, rule-based tools that handle repetitive tasks.  I’ve worked with “AI” services for more than 15 years and each had their own place and potential when used properly. Herein lies the opportunity. Modern lenders that are focused on retaining and growing their customers in an ultra-competitive market need something more dynamic. Enter AI agents that can understand context, adapt on the fly, and speak in a human-like way. These agents are coachable, brand-aware, and learn from every interaction. They don’t follow scripts—they think in real time. And when built correctly, they become a seamless part of your customer experience.

This is the evolution from AI as a support function to AI as a trusted team member.

Total Expert recently launched an AI Sales Assistant that puts this principle into action. It functions as a scalable, intelligent teammate—able to engage leads, deliver personalized conversations, and identify high-potential opportunities—all while staying aligned with your brand voice and compliance requirements. It’s not a chatbot bolted onto a CRM—it’s a fully integrated AI-enabled solution, utilizing data, embedding within workflow orchestration, and playing nice with application logic because it has the necessary context to work within your lending ecosystem.

The real “why” behind AI adoption

Before choosing any AI solution, or any technology solution, financial services firms must ask themselves: What business problem are we solving?

For example, when mortgage rates dropped for a few weeks in September 2024, our customer intelligence capabilities identified nearly $2 billion in immediate refinance opportunities. But no team of loan officers could scale quickly enough to reach every qualified lead. That’s where AI tools prove invaluable—automating first-touch outreach at scale, surfacing the best opportunities, and empowering human teams to scale up execution to drive retention and growth.

Why embedded beats bolted-on

The types of AI-enabled solutions we are talking about can’t function effectively in isolation. Without access to timely and accurate customer data, and invoked within a specific workflow process, it can’t personalize interactions, anticipate needs, or drive conversions at the right time.

Picture an AI assistant offering a refinance to a customer, only to stall when asked for more details. If it doesn’t know the customer’s current rate or financial profile, the experience feels hollow. That’s not just ineffective—it damages trust.

By contrast, when AI-enabled solutions are embedded within a unified customer experience platform like Total Expert, it draws on a 360-degree view of the customer. It knows the data, understands the history, and delivers contextually rich conversations that convert.

This is why we’re designing our AI capabilities with a focus on the unique needs of financial services organizations. The same purpose-built approach has earned the Total Expert platform its unmatched reputation for usability and time to value.

Generalist AI offerings can be a gamble that increase costs—and time to value

Implementing AI that’s not purpose-built for financial services introduces two major risks:

1. Usability failure: Your team must spend months customizing and configuring a generalist AI tool to make it work for your specific needs—if it will ever work at all. For example, imagine you’re a loan officer and one of your referral partners introduces you to a borrower. Now, you have to choose the best way to approach the first conversation with this borrower. There are countless permutations of questions and answers which all require deep personalization, compliance awareness, and consistent representation of the sales processes and brand tone of the lender. Generalist AIs will quickly reach their limitations in these complex use cases.

An industry-focused AI offering will be trained on this specific use case and provided with the context needed to hold a dynamic conversation with the borrower. This type of AI learns and adapts with each interaction, performing the most time-consuming tasks so you don’t have to.    

2. Compliance risk: Without built-in industry guardrails, you’re gambling with regulatory violations and brand safety.  As we know, the compliance landscape for financial services is broad and evolving at the federal and state level.  Look for AI offerings that are regulatory aware and enable you to configure them based on your organization’s risk tolerance and interpretations.

Lenders don’t need more tools—they need the right tools—ones that work out of the box, understand industry nuances, and deliver immediate, compliant value.

Ask these questions before you commit to an AI offering  

To maximize the probability of success, here’s a quick checklist for vetting solutions:

  • Can it solve a real, high-value business problem, and how? Review specific examples and ask to speak with other organizations that have implemented the tool.
  • Does it function as a true AI agent, not a static bot?
  • Can it be deeply integrated into your core system(s), workflow orchestration, and data?
  • Does it include financial industry compliance and brand guardrails?
  • Can it scale without sacrificing quality or regulatory integrity?

Building the future with purpose-built AI

Total Expert has always designed technology with financial services in mind, and our approach to utilizing AI is no different. We’re not chasing hype. We’re solving problems.

Our focus on AI isn’t simply building standalone features—it’s about embedded, intelligent, and deeply integrated AI solutions. It’s helping lenders scale smarter, engage more meaningfully, and turn data into action. Our AI Sales Assistant is just the beginning—an example of how purpose-built, AI-enabled solutions can solve real problems and deliver tangible value. We are already testing and exploring other AI-enabled solutions and I could not be more excited about the current and potential value our clients and our market will achieve.

Because when AI works, it’s not just impressive—it’s indispensable.

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