During the holiday season, out of office notifications and shorter work days are expected, yet oftentimes the impending break can create more stress than ease for your staff—especially if they are hustling to complete transactions before the end of the year or scrambling to ensure effective coverage while they are out of office.
Businesses that effectively leverage automation can help their team members take a necessary respite while ensuring transactions stay on course. Inserting automated components into various parts of the title workflow ensures that a file will be effectively covered while someone is out of office and also ensures that orders are processed efficiently.
What is Automation?
In the title industry, automation refers to technology that completes certain manual tasks to help increase efficiency, reduce error, and lower costs. Automation is not meant to replace humans. Instead, automation can help title professionals meet and exceed evolving consumer expectations by processing transactions more efficiently and delivering a higher level of service.
Time-saving automation features to implement today
Automation can be especially helpful in ensuring that transactions are completed regardless of reduced bandwidth during the holiday season. Below are a few examples of automation strategies that you can incorporate into your workflows to help manage pre-holiday stress.
1. Auto assigning tasks
To effectively manage deadlines and employee workloads, automatic task assignments can help managers assess processing bandwidth and, if needed, redistribute tasks among team members based on holiday schedules. With these automations set up, other employees can easily take over tasks if someone is out of the office.
2. Dynamic workflows
Advanced workflows can help processors complete tasks during the holidays if team members are on vacation or out sick. Qualia’s set of dynamic workflow tools enables title & escrow companies to create and assign Smart Tasks as well as automate the management of multiple workflows. With Smart Tasks, users can define conditions for tasks to automate various parts of a workflow. For example, users can create a Smart Task that automatically sends a notification to the buyer or seller when a fund disbursement is posted.
3. Communication triggers
By automating communication—such as status updates—title professionals are freed up from fielding the back and forth calls and emails from clients about the status of their closing. For example, with Qualia Connect, title companies can set up triggers in workflows to send custom, automated messages to the appropriate parties after a particular milestone occurs during the closing. These automated communications can be especially valuable in speeding up closings during the end of the year when clients may be eager to close on a property quickly before the new year.
4. Auto-acceptance of title orders
Manually accepting title orders can lead to inefficiencies at the start of a workflow and delay turnaround times. By automating the order acceptance process with repeat or known sources of business, title & escrow companies can save time and provide a better partner experience. In Qualia Connect, agents can enable auto acceptance of orders in settings and add filters for which orders can be auto-accepted based on certain criteria such as property state or county. If title & escrow companies experience an uptick in orders at the end of the year, enabling auto-acceptance can increase production efficiency and help distribute tasks based on bandwidth.
5. QR codes
When managing and uploading documents, QR codes can help streamline the post-closing process. In Qualia, agents can use QR codes when scanning closing documents to send them directly to the correct folders in Qualia without ever needing to save the documents to a computer. Using the QR code feature can help simplify the process of scanning multiple documents at once and ensure that all documents go to the right place.
Implementing automation features and optimizing technology tools can help businesses save processing time, create a less stressful holiday season for staff, and result in a smoother closing experience for clients year-round. For more information on Qualia’s time-saving capabilities, please request a demo below.
