The Qualia team recently connected with Debbie Schoenborn, President of Paramount Title, to learn more about how her team uses the Progress Tracker in Qualia Connect to provide clients with clear guidance and greater transparency during the closing process. Schoenborn shared how the Progress Tracker benefits her company’s client experience and reduces time-consuming back-and-forth communication during closings.
QUALIA: How does Qualia Connect fit into your business strategy and workflows?
SCHOENBORN: We really like the Progress Tracker because it gives us real-time information. When we explain Connect to a new client, we always tell them that they’ll have visibility into the transaction and be able to see their closing status at any given time. By using the Progress Tracker, we’re delivering on the pieces of the transaction that are really important to the client.
QUALIA: Thinking about the features in the Progress Tracker, what has been the best highlight?
SCHOENBORN: With the Progress Tracker, our clients can see the individual steps—the pieces that they are often calling or emailing us about. They can see the status right there anytime, day or night, when they’re at work or after.
I’ve found that a lot of clients think about their transactions at times when they maybe can’t reach the title company, like, outside regular business hours. It’s nice that they can go in and see if the earnest money has been deposited, the lender docs are uploaded, or their files have been funded. We used to always manually send out a message upon funding, and now it’s just automatic. It has cut down on phone calls, and it makes us even easier to work with, which is our goal.
Our old systems were so piecemeal. We had one system for production, another system for storing our files, and another system for securing our emails. It just looked pieced together, and now everything looks tied together and it’s so simple and modernized.
QUALIA: How have Qualia Connect’s features impacted your staff and how they work?
SCHOENBORN: Our employees are taking far fewer phone calls, and that’s going to improve even more as people get more familiar with the features in Connect. So, it frees up time for our employees. Anytime that we don’t spend on mundane tasks, it gives us more time to actually connect with people, whether they’re our teammates and colleagues, or clients and consumers.
When we’re not rushing around to get all of our manual email updates out, then when a consumer asks a question on the phone, we can actually take the time to really explain things to them because they don’t go through this every day.
We see the results in our post-closing surveys where we get client feedback that our team walked through the process with them and made them feel comfortable. That’s always the benefit of freeing up time and automating mundane things.
QUALIA: There will always be people who are hesitant to use new technology or try new things, so how do you ensure that real estate agents and homebuyers and sellers are using Connect?
SCHOENBORN: We start in the sales process. Part of trying to sell Paramount to clients is telling them about this product that enables them to communicate seamlessly and securely with us. Then, when we get our first order from a new client, the escrow officer always reaches out and talks about Connect to explain the benefits.
We discuss the importance of security, what a big target our industry is, and how we protect their clients when they work with us. We tell them that they’ll see all their files in one place and that they’ll see all the documents that we’ve sent them on any one file without having to dig through their emails to find each document. Sharing these benefits helps take care of some objections.
The biggest thing that has helped people is that we tell them to download the Connect app to their phones or bookmark the page. That seems to overcome any issues or objections that they have because it really makes it easy to work with us at that point.
Qualia: Can you give some of your team’s best practices for Connect?
SCHOENBORN: We encourage every team member to create a Connect account right from the start because it’s different from the Qualia Core product. By doing this, they can see what the clients and consumers are seeing. If they’re troubleshooting a file, we have them add themselves to that file so they can see exactly what the client is seeing and understand what’s going on. So whenever new features in Connect come out, we have them do the same: go into the client’s side of Connect and look at it from their view.
On the Core side, we have a few things that our settlement agents have to manually toggle in the Progress Tracker to ensure that everything gets toggled at just the right time rather than using the automations—everyone has their own nuances to how they configure the steps. We also send out weekly reminders so our team doesn’t forget to toggle the correct manual steps.
Everyone’s really enjoying it. It’s really so simple and so easy to use. There’s not that much that our team, clients, and consumers have to know how to do in order to use it.
QUALIA: What has been Paramount Title’s best outcome from using Connect?
SCHOENBORN: Connect has launched our business to the next level. We really come across as modernized. We’re on the cutting edge, and it allows us to have extra time to relate to our clients and our consumers.
Qualia Core revolutionized our business on the inside by allowing us to do business anywhere. When COVID hit, we were taking business from other companies that couldn’t adapt quickly. Qualia Core and Connect made it easy to take on that influx in business and scale our workflows, hire new people, and easily train them. I can’t imagine trying to train new people on our old system in the middle of a refi boom—we would never have survived. We always say: Where would we be without Qualia during the last few years?
Just like Core, Connect makes everything so easy. It makes it easy for multiple people to take on steps and know exactly what’s been communicated on a file, both from us and to us. We never miss a beat because everything’s right there in Connect.
Learn more about the latest enhancements to Qualia Connect’s Progress Tracker by clicking the link below. If you’re a Qualia customer, log into Qualia Knowledge Base to watch the full discussion with Debbie Schoenborn.
