Inside Prosperity's Playbook: Building the #1 Customer Experience in Mortgage
See how Prosperity Home Mortgage combined tech, training, and trust to deliver a customer experience that earned them the #1 spot in satisfaction — all with a small, scrappy team and a deeply personal approach.
Personalized videos. Automated journeys. Data-driven decisions.
These aren't just buzzwords at Prosperity Home Mortgage – they're the building blocks that just earned them the #1 spot in J.D. Power's 2024 Customer Satisfaction rankings. So how did they crack the code?
I sat down with Jelaire Grillo, their AVP of MarTech Strategy, to learn more about their mortgage tech leadership approach. As it turns out, success didn't come from a magic lamp or a sudden "a-ha" moment– it came from company-wide collaboration and a rethinking of how Prosperity implements technology to engage with their customers.
The Foundation: Customer-First Isn't Just a Slogan
Like many mortgage companies, "Customer satisfaction has always been our focus," Grillo explains. But they took a different approach to achieving it. Instead of chasing every new technology trend, they focused on one critical question: how could technology help them build trust with their key customer groups, borrowers and real estate agents?
"We started by taking a look at our tech, both on the marketing side and in other parts of the company," Grillo shares. Their goal was to build trust and make interactions feel intimate and intentional at scale - and to do this required investing time and effort into finding the right systems. This trust-building mortgage technology strategy meant evaluating each piece of technology, not just for efficiency, but for its ability to strengthen relationships and build trust.
"We've been through a lot of iterations over the years," Grillo notes. "But we've built on it every day, and now we've found the sweet spot for what we do and how we build out the customer experience – from application to communication to videos throughout the consumer journey."
Driving Adoption: Why Top-Down Implementation Succeeded
Many mortgage companies struggle with tech adoption because they start from the bottom up, leading to fragmented systems and poor adoption. It's not uncommon to see lenders supporting multiple CRMs, content creation tools, and other systems. But Prosperity took the opposite approach with their mortgage tech adoption strategy.
Phases of Leadership Alignment
Leadership
Alignment
.svg)
Executive buy in
Leaders trained first
Clear Accountability
Strategic
Rollout
.svg)
Mix early adopters & skeptics
Gather success stories
Monitor/Implement Feedback
Support
Scale
.svg)
Branch visits
Hands-on training
Performance monitoring
Accessible support
"We work top-down, not bottom-up," Grillo emphasizes. "Executive leadership buys in first, then it trickles down through departments." With just a small team, Grillo and her colleagues regularly travel to branches, working directly with loan officers to implement initiatives like their personalized video for mortgage clients. "We roll up our sleeves and get in the trenches," she says. "The technology is never going to be great if we don't do that."
This hands-on approach to mortgage tech implementation, while resource-intensive, drives real results. "We're severely outnumbered," Grillo admits, "but it's worth it." The proof is in their adoption rates - particularly with loan officer video content, where they've achieved high adoption across the organization.
Cracking the Video Code: From Resistance to Results
Video marketing in mortgage isn't new. Making it work consistently? That's the challenging part. As she explains, "Video is a tough hill to climb. We have climbed it. I think we're at the top of it right now. It's just about getting everybody else on board."
Prosperity faced their team's objections to creating loan officer video content head-on: "There's people who are 'my way is my way,' or they don't know what to say, they don't like the way they look, they don't like the way they sound," Grillo shares. Rather than dismissing these concerns, they developed targeted solutions for overcoming video marketing resistance. For loan officers uncomfortable with presentations, they implemented video teleprompter solutions and offered coaching assistance. For those uncertain about messaging, they created customizable video scripts for loan officers. Each solution was designed to address a specific barrier to adoption, supported by individualized coaching and hands-on loan officer tech coaching sessions with the team.
The key to success was systematically removing adoption barriers through technology change leadership. By providing pre-built, customizable scripts, Prosperity enabled personalization at scale while maintaining compliant video marketing for mortgage professionals through efficient spot-checking. Modern mortgage CRM implementation has made this process significantly more streamlined, offering built-in compliance tools alongside content creation features. This combination of practical tools and strategic support transformed resistant team members into confident video creators, proving that the right approach to loan officer tech enablement can overcome even the strongest objections to implementing new tech.
Video Objections & Solutions
I Don't Like How I Look
I Don't Know What to Say
I'd Rather Do It My Way
.svg)
Teleprompter Support
Customizable Scripts
Coaching Assistance
The Secret Sauce: Journey Mapping That Works
Running 15-20 automated mortgage communications journeys simultaneously, they've solved one of the industry's most persistent challenges: making automated customer journeys feel genuinely personal and meaningful. This level of automation requires sophisticated mortgage journey optimization tools designed specifically for the industry - something traditional CRMs often struggle to provide.
"We have a total of 34 videos now," Grillo explains, with each placement strategically considered within the mortgage customer journey mapping process. "We don't want it to be overboard," she emphasizes, highlighting their focus on quality over quantity in mortgage borrower experience design. While measuring mortgage video engagement metrics and ROI was challenging, customer surveys provided validation - videos are "mentioned nonstop" in feedback, contributing to their #1 ranking in customer satisfaction in mortgage.
Their transaction journeys typically maintain open rates in the mid to high seventies. When customer engagement metrics for mortgage communications drop below their 65% threshold, it triggers a comprehensive review process. Most importantly, they turn to their front-line experts: "We're going to ask the field... 'How would you deliver this message? What are we missing here?'" Grillo explains. "We're not loan officers, so we're not talking to clients every day - they are. They're going to have better insight than we will."
The Data Game: Beyond Basic Metrics
Prosperity's data-driven mortgage strategy combines rigorous analysis with practical application. "Data is big - we spend a lot of time in the numbers," Grillo explains. For most lenders, utilizing a platform that automatically tracks borrower and agent engagement metrics in real-time makes this mortgage data analytics much more manageable. Their team conducts monthly reviews of journey performance, consistently maintaining email performance metrics for mortgage communications in the mid to high 70s. When metrics start to slip below their threshold, they don't just look at numbers – they examine the entire customer experience.
Data Analysis Process
Collect (Open rates & engagement metrics)
Analyze (Monthly Review Process)
Act (Improve Messages)
Field Input (Front-line feedback)
What makes their approach unique is how they act on this data. For each email and trigger point that underperforms, they return to the fundamental question: "How would you deliver this message differently?" This approach ensures that data drives meaningful improvements rather than just accumulating metrics. The team looks at loan officer performance metrics across different producer levels, combining quantitative insights with qualitative feedback to create a complete picture of what's working and what isn't.
Their success metrics go beyond traditional open rates and click-throughs. "We have to get buy-in from people," Grillo emphasizes, highlighting how they measure adoption rates and user engagement alongside customer response metrics. This comprehensive approach to mortgage marketing ROI analysis ensures that every technological improvement serves both their team members and their customers effectively.
The Bottom Line
Success in technology implementation comes from understanding that tools are only as effective as the people using them. By focusing on building trust, providing consistent mortgage team technology training, and maintaining a patient, phased approach, Prosperity has created something special - a tech-forward operation that enhances rather than replaces the human element of mortgage lending. This commitment to balancing technology with human connection has paid off, earning them the #1 spot in J.D. Power's 2024 Customer Satisfaction rankings. As Grillo puts it, supporting this transformation with their small team is "exhausting and really hard because we're severely outnumbered. But it's worth it."
.svg)
