Previous In this conversation from Dallas, Texas, HousingWire’s Allison LaForgia and Phil McCall, President and Chief Operating Officer at ACES Quality Management, outlined what servicers should prioritize as the industry moves deeper into 2026 — and why “servicing smarter” means becoming far more proactive.
“I’ll go to two areas of heightened concern,” McCall said. “One, customer satisfaction… What are their needs? What are they looking to solve? Where are their problems? How do they get answers from their servicers? And especially when things are difficult, timing gets to be a point of getting good responses.”
Alongside ensuring customer satisfaction, his other concern is regulatory discipline and compliance. “With that, I’ll add regulatory compliance. It’s kind of the other side of you need to make your customers happy. There’s rules, there’s laws that have to be followed,” he said. “How do you meld those two together to make sure that you are meeting all the regulations… and in turn, getting happy customers? It’s a challenge.”
For McCall, the answer lies in shifting from reactive quality control to proactive oversight.
“Quality control really comes into play a lot at the end, after things are done,” he said. “I think that smarter servicing is, how do we start being more proactive? How are we looking at quality on an ongoing basis? How are we standardizing our data so we can work within that data and be very proactive into our quality initiatives?”
Rather than waiting for defects to surface post-audit, McCall said servicers should aim to prevent them altogether. “Let’s catch those defects before they become defects, so we don’t have the defects in the end.”
That proactive mindset is especially important when volumes fluctuate. “As soon as something happens, volumes go up, I have to hire — and when volumes go down, do I have to lay people off?” McCall said. “It really does come to that part of automation and how you’re letting systems come in and start doing work for you that enables you to be able to scale.”
He also stressed that cutting staff is not the goal. “There’s never one talking, ‘How do I reduce headcount?’ It’s all about, ‘How do I scale and handle more with the headcount that I have?’ Bring in technology and automation that will help me do that.”
That naturally brings the conversation to AI.
“It’s amazing how our world has changed over the course of the last few years, and how AI has been everywhere,” McCall said. At ACES, the approach has been practical. “How can we utilize AI to assist our customers be more efficient? How can we help them scale more?”
One early win has been leveraging large language models to improve communication. “Everything with quality control comes to communication,” he said. “Having something to assist in that writing, we found to be a huge win.”
AI is also being used to synthesize audit data. “You do an audit… there’s remediation that needs to take place. How are you synthesizing that data?” McCall said. “We have really neat AI technology with ACES Intelligence that’s now taking and synthesizing all that data… saving two, three hours per audit.”
Underlying all of it is ensuring data integrity. “Data is king. It always has been,” he said. “You’re importing data from multiple different systems. How do you manage that data? How do you control it, how do you standardize it?”
Through ACES’ Data Bridge, the company is focused on portability. “Let’s get the data in your hands so you can use it,” McCall said. “Because with that data standardization, automation can start taking place.”
That philosophy is reinforced by ACES’ recent acquisition of BaseCap Analytics. “It really goes down the vein that we have been working towards on this proactive quality control,” he said. With the ability to “assess and audit millions of transactions” daily, servicers can identify issues before they become defects.
“Give me that information up front so I can actually be proactive,” McCall said. “Let’s not have any defects.”
Looking ahead, his message to servicers is clear: Smarter servicing entails embracing technology. “I think we really need to look at the point of how we can bring in more of that data, standardize our process, bring automation and allow us to be proactive,” he said.“We need to be assessing all of our files and the data and work going on, knowing that we have to be compliant . . . and keep the customer happy.” Ultimately, he added, “balancing that in that smarter side of using your data, driving down the process, is where the solve is.”
