Founded in 1987, Cherry Creek Mortgage now has 325+ mortgage loan officers (MLOs) and offers close to 200 products. Headquartered in Denver, CO, Cherry Creek Mortgage combines local service with a national presence.

"We have a great team at Cherry Creek Mortgage Company and have helped over 160,000 families finance a home. Our work starts with a culture of support and success — with every employee, partner, and consumer," explains David Arnett, Chief Marketing Officer at Cherry Creek Mortgage. "We're more concerned with getting borrowers into the right loan versus just any loan. This passion for responsible lending is what we've built our reputation on, and is what enables us to succeed through wild housing cycles."

Cherry Creek Mortgage has a stable of customers and an established brand, but it faced a problem common to the mortgage industry — how to address the rapidly evolving customer journey online.

Several years ago, Cherry Creek Mortgage executed a rebrand to update its look and feel. The brand understood the importance of ensuring that its MLOs' information was properly updated — and that it was surfacing in search results everywhere customers might be searching. But with 80 branches, 11 divisions, and more than 300 individual loan officers serving local markets across the country, delivering the right answers everywhere customers search was easier said than done.

"What we realized was, 'Okay, we've got the new website, we've got all the materials, we've got our fresh look and feel, but now we need to introduce the brand to the world,'" Arnett says. "Trying to deliver information across social media, key sites like Google My Business, and more — while managing 300-plus loan officer accounts — was impossible. It was absolutely impossible."

Facing that impossibility, Cherry Creek Mortgage selected Yext to streamline the process of creating and updating its brand information across these search experiences. Now able to easily manage all of the facts that customers and prospects want to know about their company, products, services, and MLOs — Cherry Creek Mortgage knew it could both boost discoverability across search experiences and build brand trust.

Working with Yext has also given Cherry Creek Mortgage a clear understanding of borrower feedback, thanks to the visibility of reviews. With Yext, the brand now has greater insight into the experiences of existing customers, and has boosted the volume of first-party reviews.

"We have more than 21,000 listings right now and climbing — that alone is incredible, but then there's also the review network," Arnett says. "So with reviews, two or three days after closing, we send out an automated review email that says, 'If you had a great experience, we'd like to hear about it. If you had a bad experience, we'd love to hear about that too, so we can fix it. Here are our social channels. Pick the one that you're most comfortable with and we would appreciate a review.' We've boosted our star-rating dramatically, as well as our review volume. With Yext, Cherry Creek's MLOs now have an average rating of 4.95 stars.

"When we ask customers to leave a review, we're much more likely to hear from our happy customers. But when we do get negative feedback, Yext makes it super easy to respond in a very thoughtful and timely manner." With Yext, Cherry Creek Mortgage responds to more than 57% of their reviews within 24 hours.

"Optimizing our reputation, coupled with having compliant and accurate information everywhere, has really increased our online presence in a major way."

In the 29 months since launching in May 2017, Cherry Creek Mortgage has driven more than 25.6k clicks on its MLO listings — a year-over-year increase of 246%. This included a 207% year-over-year increase in clicks for directions, a 262% year-over-year increase in website clicks, and a 272% year-over-year increase in clicks-to-call.

Since launching with Yext, Cherry Creek Mortgage has significantly increased the overall discoverability of its MLOs and branches. The brand has also streamlined the on-boarding and off-boarding process for MLOs so that each loan officer who joins or leaves the company can have their information seamlessly updated across discovery channels — making the on-boarding process smoother, helping each MLO drive more leads, and ensuring that no gaps or contradictory information show up anywhere online.

Click here to learn more about Cherry Creek Mortgage's launch with Yext Search.