Dalibor Ivkovic – Innovation for Brokers & Beyond

I draw inspiration from innovation, moving forward and leaving our industry in a better place. Big ideas are my passion and I do feel that it is my role to continue to innovate the boundaries of how technology can transform mortgage broking and lending for everyone in the industry.

Great customer service isn’t an accident. It’s got to be part of your approach from day one. This means close alignment with key customers, asking the tricky question constantly – what can we do better? To get an honest answer to that curly question you need to be regular contact with customers so they feel like they have ‘skin in the game’.

Here at Salestrekker we have set ourselves ahead of industry customer service levels with regular review meetings with our aggregator partners where we ask honest questions and more and then listen to feedback. We discuss options prior to designing and developing the solutions our partners are requesting. And certainly before any direct implementation with the broker channel. What this gives us is a top-level idea of where our customers want to head and what they want to achieve.

We also set key performance indicators – our original customer query response rate benchmark was 20 seconds. Today we respond to customers in 14 seconds. That means our customer service desk is open from 6am – 10pm during the week and 8am to 3pm on Saturdays. Being available during those high-stress times delivers the customer service levels brokers need, and this is reflected in the feedback about high levels of customer satisfaction.

Salestrekker is driven by innovation. Our vision to launch Salestrekker 2.0 underpinned everything the team focused on—whether that was software development or collaborating with our partners and aggregators to link requested improvements into the tech stack to build a better Salestrekker.

Recently we shortlisted what our key examples of innovation in the past year included. For me, it was easy to summarise – lender education tools, deal scenario tools and the big one for us – a real-time decision service. Yep, you read that right. If you are a broker wanting to make faster and better decisions – a real-time decision service.

The toughest challenge I face in my role is also what drives me – turning the big ideas I have into reality. I don't just go off and interpret these big ideas into what we think our partners want and need. Instead, the next step is the crucial component of our results. Key initiatives need an advisory board or highly engaged top-level users of Salestrekker across a broad range of aggregators and in different geographic locations. We've found customer and broker behaviour differs in different locations and we need to support this. Then we roll out our planned strategy of review meetings, software development and review processes. All feedback is integrated into our software development program.

A new focus for the Salestrekker product team and some of our goals for the next five years includes the rollout of Salestrekker 2.0 and then a moving into the lending space here in Australia and New Zealand. Our first offering – Spark – and then – Lightning is in the pipeline. We also plan on releasing a new lender origination platform called LoanTrekker. Spark and Lightning will help Lenders get closer to the broker network with an earlier presentation of products to help brokers share scenarios with lenders while the application is underway. This gives Lenders and brokers greater ability to share information and digitally assess the suitability of certain loans in real-time – before locking anyone in.

LoanTrekker is our new platform that will help lenders originate loans themselves through their own sales network or assess third party or digital channel loans.

Expect more innovation from the team at Salestrekker as we roll through 2024 and beyond.

About Salestrekker

Salestrekker 2.0 is Australia’s first combined lending, origination and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform. The new features, flexibility, and functionality deliver unprecedented workflow and marketing automation to help brokers diversify from mortgages to new asset financing in a single platform – and without the need for external IT support. www.salestrekker.com