Practical AI in Title Operations: Onboarding, Dashboards & Scorecards | Ep 116

In a world where change is the only constant, Mo Choumil stands at the forefront, guiding title professionals to not just grow their businesses, but to master the art of innovation. With every episode, you're handed the keys to unlock unparalleled growth and stay ahead of the curve. Get ready for a transformative journey. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Title Agents Podcast. I am your host, Mo Choumil, and I have today, I have Hope Araviani.

This is our Chief Operating Officer, and I have Nadja Rivera, our Post-Closing Manager, to share. This is one of our AI Corner segments. We're just going to give you some real-life scenarios, how we're implementing AI in our real life. This is not theories, how we're actually using it. day-to-day to improve our workflows.

And, uh, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna leave, uh, leave it up to you, Hope, to introduce yourself, give a brief introduction. So for those that do not know you. Yeah. Hi everybody. Again, I've been here a few times, but, uh, my name is Hope Ahdoviani.

I am the Chief Operating Officer of ATG and Alltech, and we are building a lot of really cool things. Um, I know I've talked about dashboards and metrics in the past, um, previous podcasts. But today I wanna focus on actually putting it into motion, what that looks like. And I've even taken it back to the beginning for onboarding. So I wanna transition into what that looks like, how we're implementing onboarding at a high level, and then I can kind of go into some of the dashboards.

So I will share my screen, Mo, if that's okay. I'm gonna share my screen. Yeah, we, we get out, we're doing, uh, we get doing too short, uh, Podcast here. First one's gonna be with Hope sharing her operation piece on the front end of the house. Then we have Nadja's gonna show her the post-closing piece.

So let's focus on the front of the house for right now and take it, take it, Hope. Sounds good. So front of the house with me. When you come on board with ATG and Alltech, you're gonna get like a welcome email. So before I was doing, oh, hey, here's an email, and it was just, you know, very monotonous, and here's just a long email.

So I wanted to make it more visual and interactive. So what we did was we built a project in Claude, which we went over in our last podcast, and I've just put it into an artifact or an HTML, if you will. And that HTML has clickable links. So here I'm sharing my screen and you'll see that you are now enrolled. And this is just a mock template, not an actual one, but you can scroll down and kind of go through the Alltech Learning Hub.

And what it includes is a digital onboarding that brings you to a virtual hub that has Alltech's core values. It's got a little owl that jumps across the letters. It'll take you to interactive quizzes and quiz you on, well, what is one of the core values of Alltech? And what, you know, what's the first step? What's your first hour going to look like?

And it just gives— goes through all that information. And then I have clickable links to the PDFs such as our benefits, payroll, how to access your email, and just make sure all the streamlined rules and stuff about wire and fraud knowledge and stuff like that. So As you can see, are you, uh, are you able to, uh, give a little demo, like through the, the learning hub? Yeah. So this one is like, um, welcome to Alltech.

And it didn't bring you to the first one because this is my mock example, but I usually on the main page, it's a video of me and I say, welcome to Alltech. Who, who doesn't want to see my face everywhere? Uh, and then I've got a little owl bouncing on the letters and then it brings you to like these little libraries and you can click on the first one. And it was, it's like this. The first page comes to this.

You've joined ATG. Where are we licensed? 30+ states. What countries are we in operation in? Where are our main markets?

Who's the team members? So it kind of goes through— this is the first hub that is just the basic knowledge of where we're licensed. It gives you a color-coded map and then it asks you questions. So as long as you answer the questions, you can go down and answer every question. Again, this is my test one, but as long as you get to the end, it'll open up the next hub for you.

So I'm just gonna answer these, complete and return to hub. And as you can see, it brings you back to your hub. Then it goes into the mission and core values, meet the team, your first 90 days processing, Qualia access, and so forth. So it's just a basic hub. And then at the very end, when you complete your assessment, it gives you a free Starbucks card.

You know, you know, $5 to $10 card. I want one. Can I get a, can I get a card? Right. So as long as you complete your assessment and you get 100%, yeah.

Send me the link. You better pay attention. So that's what we're doing in onboarding right now. And again, we've only done it a couple times so far, but as we do each one, I'm getting feedback and I'm getting a lot of good feedback and we can adjust and pivot as needed and add. So I like to have as much information, but I want it to be visual and interactive.

And that was my whole goal behind it. So that's kind of the onboarding. And again, they can bookmark this at the top so they can always go back and access it, but then nobody has to question, well, Hope, how do I do this? What do I do this? It should mitigate those questions in the onboarding process because all of it is here.

So that is kind of what I want to focus on there. And then we can kind of go on the scorecards. Yeah. So this may seem trivial to all of you, uh, Fidelity, First American, but to, uh, for a typical, uh, to an independent agency, this is a big deal. So.

It's a very big deal. Yes. I know. I'm very proud of this. This is my little baby.

Um, because onboarding has always been like the bane of my existence since I've been here in 15 years, right? And it, it's just developed as we've gone and we've tried VT Lightspeed and we've tried these other opportunities and avenues, but this I could do in less than an hour. I could adjust it, pivot, and, and add my knowledge and my interaction and all that stuff and the quizzes to it. So I think it makes it a lot more fun and more Alltech-y, if you will. Awesome.

Keep, uh, keep moving forward. All right. So the next thing I wanted to kind of, and this is, so we started with the beginning. Now I wanna go into measuring people and measuring, um, the branches and the success and how you make decisions. So I was thinking about it and I was like, okay, well, how everybody measures people, right?

How do I do that and how do I make it fun? So I wanted to kind of go to— well, that's our test, if you will. This is our dashboard that I do all of my tabs with scorecards and financials. But let's go into the branch scorecard. So this is a test mock example, but I wanted it to be colorful with Alltech and I wanted to measure everything that was in our title platform.

But put it in one dashboard. So every month I refresh it. It's so simple. I built it and then I just refresh it every month with updated metrics. But it shows you the month-to-date open, month-to-date closed, your closing ratio, error rate for your branch.

It shows you phone activity and metrics. I haven't gotten the email metrics in there. That's still a work in progress. What do you mean by phone metric? Just for the— Yeah.

So how many calls you've missed, how many calls you've taken. So it gives you kind of that missed percentage, which Again, is a decision opportunity for the branch managers. They know that on their team and their direct reports, how many people are missing calls? Is mine really low? Like, you can set that standard.

I want it to be over 80% right now. Like, if you were looking at this branch, I think we could strive to something better next month. Like, every month I want to go up 2%, make it measurable and achievable. And it's nice to kind of measure per role who's actually completing their tasks, because a lot of people just do it by hand or they print files still. But we are a digital company, so I need to know those task completions so I can measure your productivity, right?

So that's kind of what that gives. I always strive to be, you know, 75%. Again, this is an example, but we have improved a lot over the last, I would say, 90 days. It's just gone up and up and up, which is good. And you want to see that.

And then we've added AI and quality control, stuff like that. And it's been very helpful. But moving down below, I also give you their direct reports, your branch. If it's successful, it'll give you who's got errors, you know, where they were. I guess, did you get that money back?

Was it still an error? Is it reimbursable? Is it just the cost of doing business? And you can click on it too. Again, this is just an example.

And then it gives a coachable opportunity. So what I wanted was like, I wanted my voice also in there. Yes, we have one-on-ones. Of course, I'm not just leaving it up to AI. But I also give like, what are your quarterly goals, how we can feed off of that opportunity and coaching insights.

So as you can see, we just kind of go down and down. It gives them to-dos. If they tell me, can you switch this, let's focus on this, I'll just refresh the HTML. Very simple. But it gives you that accountability and that visibility, which has been very helpful.

So that is the branch scorecard. And the last thing I'll kind of go into is I wanted to treat it like a funnel. We start at the top, we have onboarding, then you go into your department and then you went and you measure those individuals in the department. And that's where we bring in the escrow officers. So I know Nadja's gonna talk about her post-closing, but I, uh, was an escrow officer before in my leadership role and I wanted to, I always wanted to see visibility on my caseload.

How many files did I have? Any errors? Um, what did I close last month and what was the revenue? Uh, I ran it myself, but now I have just created this in the last few weeks. Um, like an individual scorecard for the escrow officers, not just for your branch managers, because they may have 20 direct reports.

This is for the individual escrow officers and if they get a bonus. So as you can see, if you have to close over 30 or whatever your bonus structure is, um, here's the total revenue process, here's the average revenue per file. Did you have any errors? And then does it say you earned it or not? Um, so that's kind of helpful that you're not waiting for a manager to tell you, did I get my bonus or not?

Sure. So you have predetermined metrics, uh, depending on the region. Correct. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. And, and it's gonna change per region. You know, a branch in the Midwest may have a different structure than the, the East Coast, but I, I built it based on that region's, um, bonus structure. So, yeah. And then every month, all I do is like, by the 5th of each month, I'll just feed my Claude.

I'm like, hey, here's the updated metrics. I'll upload it from Qualia or whatever title platform we're using. And then I say, please refresh the escrow officer scorecards. Voilà. It doesn't like less than 2 minutes.

And the client satisfaction that's pulled directly from Qualia, or is that from— It is. Yep. So what I do each month, um, because certain TPSs don't have an open API, I have all of the survey results, month-to-date open, month-to-date closed, um, phone analytics, everything emailed to dashboards@atg.com, which is just our, our distribution. And then, uh, my AI can read those, uh, attachments and then feed it into this HTML. Yeah.

So that is pretty much it. And it also gives coachable insights and I always CC the branch manager as well. And my goal is to kind of pass the baton to the branch manager so they can kind of take this ownership over. So I'm creating it for them and then they would take it and then have these decision-making conversations with their individual escrow officers. Yep.

That's a great, great job. So help me through the decision process. How, what kind of made you think of this dashboard? Is it through a, a pain you had you wanna solve, or is it more about playing around with Claude and, you know, interacting with it, asking it for— For me, it was a pain I wanted to solve because I, I am a visual person. I know Mo doesn't think so.

I'm more, I love essays. I do. I love writing. Mo loves it. I love writing essays, but I also want, not everybody's like me.

And every time I would send an email and it was 3 paragraphs long, Or every time I would attach this Excel spreadsheet that was 50, you know, thousand columns, nobody's gonna read that. So I was thinking, I was like, there has to be a way for people who are visual that would, they would have a dashboard that's not only colorful, visual, but it would tell them how they're doing. Because yeah, we can all do face-to-face, we can all do one-on-ones. They, I can shoot you an email. My manager's, you know, harassing me again.

Great. But I wanna know how I'm actually doing and can I take this, these metrics and grow? Do I want a leadership position? Do I want to change positions? Is this the right seat for me?

If I'm constantly making errors, maybe I would be best suited in a different position. So I think this is very helpful information, not only to help the branch manager, but to help the individual escrow officer as well. And I am— I'm not going to do post-closing, which is a different department, because Nadja's doing her own thing because she also loves AI and we're all kind of in this together and she's doing very similar dashboards. But it was a pain point for me. And since I was a processor, uh, escrow officer for 10+ years, I never got to see this and I missed it.

And I was like, I, I want somebody to tell me how I'm doing. I, I, I know I'm great, but you know, like, I want somebody to tell me how I'm doing. I want actual metrics that I can measure myself because I'm an overachiever. But you know, that's how it is. It's nice to have.

As, uh, there, there is a management adage that goes, what gets measured gets managed. So if you don't measure it, you cannot manage it. So what, uh, what's on, what's on the horizon, uh, like in the, in the near future? You know, AI moves so fast. What's on the horizon next 2 to 4 weeks, not next year?

I know. Well, for me, I want to start building agents. So I know Mo and I have had lots of conversations on actually, we've got the dashboards, we've got measurable, you know, metrics, KPIs. Now I want an agent to do it for me, or an agent to do inbox triage, or an agent to do, start doing stuff for me. So, When I'm doing meetings or I'm traveling to Wisconsin, I'm with Mo going to Pittsburgh, like I need my, my desk to still move.

I need things to keep moving while I'm out without having to get an assistant, right? So I wanna work on bots, I wanna work on agents. I wanna start, I know Grok, what's it called? GrokBot. I know that— I introduced to GrokBot.

How is that coming along? It, I have 4. I know it's great. It's only a week. Yeah, it's only been a week.

So I have 4 built, but I haven't put them into motion yet. So, I've got one for content and I started, you know, doing alliteration, Connie Content, Lila, whatever. And I, we started having names with them so that they can start working for me, but I haven't put them into, oh, I called it Emailia, email, Emailia. I was like Amelia, but really Emailia. So we're working on it, but I have to put it into motion, which is a perfect week because I'm gonna be gone Wednesday through Friday this week.

So let's start seeing what those agents can do. That's awesome. Well, thank you. Thank you, Hope. And Again, we're sharing with you what we do in real life.

This is not theory. This is not what you hear, and then everybody's trying to scare you about AI, but this is a— there's so much positive and we want to kind of put the positive spin on it and to show you exactly what we're doing. And hopefully you can endorse it and embrace it as well. And if you have any questions, please reach out to me or to Hope or Nadja. Well, thank you so much for joining us and we'll see you next episode.

Thank you. In a world where change is the only constant, Mo Choumil stands at the forefront, guiding title professionals to not just grow their businesses, but to master the art of innovation. With every episode, you're handed the keys to unlock unparalleled growth and stay ahead of the curve. Get ready for a transformative journey.