Winners of ‘Best Local Building Society’ award for third consecutive year

How are Harpenden Building Society exceeding customer expectations year after year? The Society shares its winning tactics.

Harpenden Building Society’s Head of Lending, Ken Hale, explains “We believe winning the What
Mortgage ‘Best Local Building Society’ award for the third consecutive year reflects the fact that we
listen and respond to our customers and brokers, in order to best deliver mortgages in complex
lending situations. As a Society we focus on being easy to do business with and strive for continuous
improvement. We’ve made significant progress and will continue to get better.”

Assessing every situation

Head of Underwriting, Richard Mason, added “Our Underwriting Team is highly experienced and
loves the challenges that come with assessing each individual mortgage application. Helping
customers in such a way is an extremely rewarding feeling. Achieving great outcomes for our brokers
wins them customer recommendations too. The demand for this individual approach continues to
grow as many customers have complex requirements and need a service that looks after them.”

Demonstrating a response

Deploying a team of specialist underwriters to manually assess each application has certainly
improved the Society’s capability to respond to mortgage applications. Additional ways the Society
has responded to customer and broker requirements include:

  • Enhancing the Society’s Premier Broker Programme
  • Launching a more appropriate family and specialist range of mortgages
  • Providing user friendly, quick reference, lending criteria guidelines

Ken’s final comment concluded “We would not have been able to capture and respond to customer requirements without the exceptional broker relationships our BDM team work hard to maintain. For this, I can’t thank them enough. They really do provide a voice for our customers and brokers, to ensure that everyone’s needs are considered in all that we do.”
“This award is especially important to us, as it is voted for by our customers and brokers.”

The Society’s Chief Executive, Carl Astley, added “This award is especially important to us as it’s
voted for by our customers and brokers. Winning this is testament to the hard work and
achievements by everyone across the team. I’d like to thank all who have voted us ‘Best Local
Building Society’ once again.”

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