00:06Today, I'm joined by CEO and founder of Total Expert, Joe Welliu. Joe, thank you for joining
00:13me today. Thanks, Allison. It's great to be in Austin with you guys. I want to start with
00:17talking about your description of the evolution from traditional customer intelligence to what
00:25is Total Expert's Customer IQ. So as you know, we just announced Customer IQ as this next evolution
00:32of our platform. And we've been working really hard behind the scenes on taking what we built
00:39with customer intelligence, which has been trusted across the industry to help organizations retain
00:46and recapture and go deeper with their past customers. We've taken that and we've reimagined
00:52it for the AI revolution, what we call this agentic lending opportunity that exists, where
01:00AI agents just compound what a loan officer, what an organization is able to do by an order
01:08of magnitude that you never imagined. I'll give you an example. Customer IQ aggregates all of
01:16the different data points and interprets what those data points mean and why is this relevant
01:23to my customer. And ultimately, what's going on in my customer's life at this moment that I can connect
01:30with them on and provide value to them. So if you think about a customer that maybe has been running
01:39up their credit card bills, okay, over the last six months, maybe they had some medical issues,
01:44maybe they had some unnecessary expenses, but it's clear from what's happening on their credit report
01:51that they have a spiking revolving debt, right? Customer IQ knows that. And then ultimately,
01:58customer IQ also knows that, wait a second, you've got three, 400,000 in equity in your home. You're only
02:07at
02:07about maybe 50% of your loan to value. So you've got plenty of cushion. And then it also knows
02:14that
02:14if we pulled out $50,000, $60,000, it could make a huge impact on your financial, on your cash
02:22flow and
02:23your financial position as a consumer. Customer IQ brings all that together. And then it puts it into
02:30our agentic layer, which ultimately is the AI agents that can go out and have a conversation,
02:37send a text, a voice call, and then bring the loan officer into the loop. So if you think about
02:44a loan
02:44officer historically, and they would be going through their database at random, and their ability to
02:52precisely A, have all of that information in one place, because if they didn't input it in the CRM, or
02:59the data
02:59team didn't bring it to them, they wouldn't know it anyway. So not only do they have to not worry
03:04about it being
03:05in a CRM somewhere, but ultimately, the AI agent will bring them into the loop. And anything that the AI
03:12agent and
03:13the customer talked about, goes back into customer IQ. Okay, and then it informs really what to do next.
03:20That's incredible. That's pretty cool. That's, that's incredible. But I'm going to double down
03:25with you, Joe, and I'm going to ask you to talk about results, because this sounds amazing. But what
03:31have you seen as far as measurable wins for lenders who are implementing this technology in terms of
03:38conversions, loan volume and efficiency? It's hard to overstate how extraordinary some of the results
03:46that we're seeing are. To give you some specific numbers. We have seen in a calling through my,
03:55my portfolio, okay, we've seen people increase the applications during little rate dips, what we call
04:03these little mini refi bones, three to four times more loan applications than if they just use the humans.
04:10Wow. And if you think about it, it's actually not that hard to get there. Think about taking a call
04:18center
04:18the size of rocket. Okay, only making it way smarter, and dropping it alongside of every loan officer.
04:26And so traditionally, if I'm a retail loan officer, as an example, we work with lenders
04:31on the direct to consumer side, and the retail side, and then the blend in between, because there
04:38are some blended lines in the industry. But if you think about that, taking this huge horsepower that
04:45you have now to go out and communicate in a very high quality way, to just absolutely limitless.
04:53It's not that hard to say I'm going to generate three or four times more applications, because
04:58usually what would happen, let's say rates drop, and there's an opportunity to serve 100, 1,000,
05:0410,000 borrowers, you're limited on how many of those people you can talk to at any given moment
05:11in time, because time matters. And so now I can go out, talk to thousands and thousands of people,
05:19or hundreds, whatever the size of the database is, put time on the calendar for that loan officer.
05:24So I'll give you an example. We had a top producer for one of our customers, they had 26 appointments
05:31over two days on a Thursday and a Friday. So the old way of doing it is they would have
05:37come into
05:37their office, they would said, Oh my gosh, rates dropped. And I've got 150 borrowers, I'm going to
05:43reach out via email, I'm going to text them, I'm going to try to call them. And then they would
05:49maybe get
05:49a couple going, and then sort of everything else would fall to the wayside. This speaks to our
05:56industry's average of maybe only 20% retention as a average retention. And so now they can go in,
06:05I have 26, 27 appointments, I think it was on a Thursday and a Friday, in one hour increments with
06:11people that are ready to talk about how you can help. Joe, you just highlighted some pretty big
06:16gains that different lenders have seen. And that's critical right now for our industry.
06:22You mentioned increased conversion rates, higher loan volume during mini refi booms. From your
06:28perspective, what has success looked like so far for the lenders who have already implemented customer
06:34IQ? It's been amazing. And it's been the most fun that we've had partnering with our customers since
06:41I started the company. So it's just been incredibly rewarding to go in and be able to help them move
06:47their businesses forward towards generally a very aligned vision of customer for life with every
06:55organization that we partner with genuinely deeply believes that the most profitable way to grow their
07:03organization and build a sustainable lender in 2026 and beyond is to go really deep with your
07:09customers, get loyalty. And up until the last year, the limiting factor to doing that was ultimately
07:19day to day human behavior. I had to trust that my well intentioned salespeople in the field or in the
07:27call center, we're going to be able to remember a conversation, we're going to be able to speak very
07:32precisely on what's important to you as a consumer personally. And if you can just augment their
07:39their skills, which are that connection and advice in that moment, you augment that with the most
07:47brilliant, intelligent assistant you've ever imagined. It's a recipe that opens up this new
07:53world of possibilities. You just mentioned the recipe and it seems like a key ingredient to that
07:59recipe is context, which you touched on earlier in our conversation. How does having a complete
08:05real-time view of the customer translate into a better outcome for the customer and the LO?
08:11So it really is that context layer, that system of context that can aggregate everything around a
08:19consumer in terms of data and signals, intent, all of that. Interpret it, prioritize it,
08:27and then ultimately feed that into my human loan officers or sales organization and the AI agents
08:34that are working alongside them. And when you have an AI assistant, a loan officer that are speaking
08:42with precision on what's personally important to every customer, you just end up with a higher quality
08:50interaction. You end up with a customer that feels like you deeply understand them and you're providing
08:55them information because customer IQ and our system of context doesn't just help power AI agents,
09:03but it can help power your email. It can help power text messaging and other things in the business
09:09that you're looking at. It's a foundational change on how you think about categories like CRM.
09:18And CRM is really an outdated word because it's this data repository that was static, wasn't evolving.
09:29And a system of context now is really the next generation of this technology stack that lenders need
09:38to, I believe, be competitive and win in 2026 and beyond.
09:44And to your point earlier, it's surfacing the right insight at the right time for the right borrower.
09:51It's ultimately thinking of how do I, how do I add value to my customer in the precise moment that
10:00matters and only speak to them about things they care about? And that's really the essence.
10:05And it clearly has a very positive effect from the measurable results that you mentioned earlier.
10:12A hundred percent. If you think about other AI
10:17waves that we've seen in our industry, there's nothing like this one. Most of the AI was very
10:22incremental. It was, and it still is important, redefining how we're underwriting files and the
10:29document management and all those things. Those things are important. But it's very incremental
10:35in how the impact shows up in the business. Because this is helping you go deeper with customers and
10:42ultimately create loans and new revenue. The ROI is nearly immediate. And so you don't have this long
10:51period of time where I've got to go, okay, well, who do I need to move around in my organization?
10:57It's immediate impact with just delivering better outcomes for your consumer, which translates into
11:04growth for the organization. Now, the pace of innovation, you've mentioned different ways that
11:11Total Expert has taken and built on the success that you've had. As you continue to evolve and the
11:18capabilities that you have evolved, how do you expect these outcomes and results to scale? And what
11:24does success look like in the next phase? Success for us is very simple. How do we partner and help
11:31our customers win at the very highest level? Period, full stop. That's how we think about everything.
11:36This is a solution and a set of capabilities that I believe are incredibly important to helping them do
11:44that. That's fantastic. What's next? So we are, I would say, have taken a more extreme and aggressive
11:52approach to innovating and moving quickly. It's just what's required to win in 2026. You know, we're going
12:00through our organization and how we're building and creating products, the speed of prototyping
12:06everything. We've transformed everything. And so what's next for us is we're releasing actually very
12:12soon our next AI agent, which is actually a refi agent, which helps you go in and analyze your
12:21portfolio, create scenarios and just do some really cool things that used to be very task-based, human
12:29task-based. And we're just putting that alongside the loan officer. So I just had a demo of it yesterday
12:34and we're pretty excited to bring that to market in the next month or so.
12:37Can't wait to see it. Joe, thank you for telling me what Total Expert's been up to.
12:41I can't wait to see what's next. Always a pleasure, Allison.
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