Dec

Client Bulletin: December 9, 2022

Self-Serve Call Recordings Coming in Q1 2023

In early 2023, Cenlar will introduce a new feature intended to enhance your ability to self-serve: online access to call recordings. This new feature, scheduled to launch by the end of the first quarter, will allow you to play back or download calls authenticated in our IVR within minutes of the call’s completion.

Clients will have access only to calls associated with their own zone code or codes. Recordings will be available within this system for all calls taken after April 2021 for our Customer Interaction (CI) contact center and after December 2022 for our Default Call Center (DCC).

Clients will be able to find calls using the following searchable fields:

Zone Code
Incoming phone number
Date and time
Loan Number

For privacy reasons, unauthenticated calls will not be available for search, meaning the more people who use authentication within our IVR, the more calls that will be available to you with this new capability. On average, about 70% of the calls we receive are authenticated—with roughly 91% of calls from homeowners being authenticated and approximately 35% of calls from third parties.

For older calls and any other call not found in the new system, you will still be able to use the current process of obtaining call recordings through Cenlar’s QA team.

We’ll be providing you more information regarding the process, how to access the system and the interface itself as we continue to finalize details over the coming months.

If you have any questions, please reach out to your client manager.

Cenlar’s IT Quality Assurance Process Keeps Pace with Evolving Technology

The effective integration of information technology into Cenlar’s business processes has become increasingly important to our mission of continual improvement.

And as Cenlar’s technological capabilities have evolved, so has our quality assurance (QA) process. QA is a crucial part of our software and application lifecycle. By embedding quality assurance into Cenlar’s expanding technological resources, we can help eliminate the risks associated with application and software failure.

“Automated testing is an industry standard in highly matured IT QA organizations,” said Josh Reicher, Cenlar’s Chief Digital Officer. “We will always look to expand our capabilities by adding additional tools to our test suite and framework to continuously maintain and improve that maturity.”

Here’s a snapshot of the advanced testing types and tools being used at Cenlar, and how they are helping us improve our software and application development process:

Performance and load testing

One way in which we are achieving quality assurance is through performance and load testing, ensuring our systems’ speed, responsiveness and stability under varying workloads.

“We have built a mature performance and load testing practice that ensures stability of our key client-facing platforms every day, even during peak demand,” said Girish Jain, Cenlar’s Vice President of Enterprise QA and Architecture. “All API throughput and performance is constantly measured against established baselines, and are subjected to stress and endurance tests to ensure that the system will handle the load during peak processing times.”

Performance and load testing not only helps us augment the availability, accessibility, security and overall performance of the applications, but it also allows us to catch potential problems before they occur.

Automated testing

Cenlar’s automated testing handles many tasks that were previously carried out by manual testers, resulting in process improvements.

At Cenlar, automated testing techniques using a state-of-the-art framework and tools are extensively utilized by our IT QA team. These techniques help find defects before they become production incidents, enabling us to deliver better, more reliable service to you and your homeowners.

We have extended the use of automated tests to do active production monitoring and generate alerts for many client-facing platforms, as well as our call center telephony system. These tests emulate manual tester activity by setting up specific scenarios and using simulated transactions to identify issues that could potentially affect our end users. These synthetic transactions are primarily used to test the performance of production environments, but they are also helpful for testing the functionality of updated applications prior to deployment.

Security testing

Security testing ensures the stability of an application, and can help identify potential security risks in the software or application. This includes monitoring and maintaining application security by conducting dynamic security scans of applications such as Cenlar.com, Forbearance Web and CenAccess.

Available Online Soon: 1098s for Tax Year 2022

With year-end nearly here, your homeowners will likely start wondering when their 1098s for 2022 will be available to them.

For payoffs, 1098s will be available online in mid-December
We will email all other homeowners about the availability of their 1098s online, likely in early January
1098s will be mailed to homeowners by the end of January

FYI: Other Important Items that You Need to Know

Branch Payment Return Process Moved to CCM

As of Dec. 31, 2022, we will be fully transitioning our branchreturnrequest@cenlar.com mailbox to CCM. This applies to cases where the payment was not honored by the drawee bank.

When submitting a ticket through CCM, please choose the dropdown “branch payment return”. The branch return form as well as a copy of the returned item is required.

Cenlar will continue to maintain wire instructions. If these instructions change at any time, a letter on your letterhead signed by an officer with the wire instructions will be required.

Homeowner Website Guide

We’ve updated our client guide to the homeowner website. The new version of this Homeowner Website Guide can be found on CenAccess, on the Training & Reference menu under User Manuals.