Customer Service Is Always # 1

As I sat in the same room with Don, listening to him tell the story of how DSI got started, how the technology for DocMagic was developed, and his future plans for DSI, it became apparent that Don still has the same passion for providing superior customer service that he had 18 years ago when DSI first opened its doors.

Through Don's leadership, DSI has grown into an industry giant in the loan doc prep arena. According to Mike Zarrilli, DSI's Operations Manager:

"Don is the backbone of DSI. He is a great innovator and has great vision for the direction our company needs to go and how it will grow. He has a great business mind and a wonderful sense of what will work and what won't work and we depend on that to keep us on the cutting edge of technology and always a step (and more) ahead of our competition. His seal is on everything we do, whether it is DocMagic for Windows, DocMagic On-Line, LoanMagic or any of our internal applications. He is involved in all aspects of our products and is a "hands-on" President. We all appreciate that because we know with his input and our incredible staff, all working together, our customers will always get the best product available. That is the reason we have been so successful for 18 years and counting. I see us becoming even more successful in the next 18 years and more. Working with Don has been great for me personally. This has been a great opportunity and I am very thankful for that. Don is an extremely generous and kind man, not only to me but to the whole company - he really cares deeply for all his employees. I am very proud to work for him, but even more proud to call him my friend."

Following are excerpts from my interview with Don.

Laying the Groundwork...

What gave you the idea of forming DSI? Did you have a software or mortgage background?
Don: When I was in college as a Finance & Computer Methods & Business Major, I worked for a company that prepared documentation for the mortgage industry. Back then, there were a handful of companies here in Southern California preparing documents. It was a very manual process. You would pull the forms off the wall, stick the forms in a typewriter, then readjust, type some more, readjust, etc. It would take quite a bit of time to get these forms done. The technology was mainframe-based at that time. PCs had only just been developed. Doc prep was a slow process. I was a customer service representative, and it took forever to get anything done. Customers would ask for a new document or a change and it seemed like it took months to get it done… if it was done at all. It was highly inefficient and the systems seemed archaic to me, compared to what was possible. I could see the need for great improvement in the repackaging of information, taking in data, reformatting that data and transmitting it back. This seemed like a compelling business proposition. That's what gave me the idea to break out on my own and solve the major problems with that business model.

When DSI was formed in 1988, what was it like? How was it different than other competitors?
Don: Our competitors were really slow. Everybody was slow. I wanted to speed the process up and get the forms out as quickly as possible. There were a lot of mortgage programs then, but it could take months to set up a new ARM program. The process was programmer-intensive. The first thing I wanted to do was create a system that would allow non-programming personnel to create forms and loan programs and put them into effect and do that very, very quickly. My thought was that it would work for any industry that has any amount paper, not just the mortgage industry. So that was my thinking, and I sought to create a system for accomplishing that.

So, what prompted you to start DSI?
Don: The deciding factor was that I literally became fed-up with the inefficiencies within my employer's IT department. It seemed absolutely ridiculous to me how slow and inefficient they were. Creating customer reports and getting any data out of their systems was very difficult and time consuming. I explained to the president that with the size of his technical staff, he should have any type of data coming out of the IT department that he wanted. I went on to explain that the real problem was his lack of ability to direct the IT Department effectively. So, needless to say, I didn't get my reports completed. Later, I brought Jim Adrig, a personal friend at the time, in and we proposed a system that would control the transaction logging and track client accounts. It wouldn't process documents; it was only going to manage the logging of transactions which, at that point, was a manual process. Back then, they would handwrite incoming orders into a book. Ultimately, in the loan package was an invoice that would be printed out like another document. At the end of the process or at the end of the month someone would separate that NCR invoice and take out a calculator or a keypad and add them up. The process was time consuming and prone to error. It didn't need to be like that. It meant one more unnecessary employee and one more example of a complete waste of time. So we designed a system that would accomplish all of that and it was PC-based. Jim and I presented it to the company president and demonstrated how it would work and how we had essentially automated the entire log tracking system. I said, "Here's the coolest part" and I hit a key. The prototype system computed all the invoices for 1,000 example clients, right then, within seconds. It not only did that, it managed the accounts receivables, payables and purchasing, and it's actually the accounting system that we have here today… the same system.

Oh really? He was probably blown away, huh?
Don: I think he was. However, the IT guy that ran the place quickly told him that we were using archaic technology even though, of course, it was running on a PC, which had only just been invented. So archaic wasn't the right word, but it was the word he used. Essentially, he was concerned with his own job security.

At that point I said: "Look, a PC costs $6,000.00 right now," (that was the cost at that time) "You're going to get the fastest PC available and we're going to throw all of the software in for free and make it interface with the mainframe. You just buy the computer and the rest is done."

But, he wouldn't do it. It was crazy! So that night Jim and I re-grouped and decided, "We're building this ourselves." From that night, it took 6 months to get DSI going and put that ineffective doc prep company out of business. We did that by coming out with a slightly lower price, a more efficient operation and we offered same-day service. Same-day service was what really did it. In our area, document delivery was still courier-based. Every company had an internal courier that delivered the prepared documents. There was no Internet and there was no way to electronically transmit documents, because documents were still primarily carbonized and/or NCR. So, the only way to get documents anywhere was to physically take it or overnight it via courier service. But, the mass majority of the business was within courier range; so, offering same day service meant that an order coming in by 10:00 a.m. could be processed and out that afternoon. And, if any new orders came in that afternoon, they would be processed and delivered the next business morning. Same-day service was unheard of and the clients just loved it; they thought it was phenomenal.

Were there any other companies that provided "same-day" service at the time?
Don: No. Because we were the only ones doing same day service, we immediately started to hurt all the local competition. There were a number of them, 3 or 4 in Orange County alone. We made a significant impact in a short period of time.

Wow! The President of that company should have been afraid of the potential of what your company could do.
Don: Yes, and at that point, 99% of what they produced was purchased from a foreign vendor. So, there was very little compliance or much of any legal aspect to what was going on. The documents were pre-printed. You bought them from a forms vendor and that was it -- that was where they came from. Right away we were much more customer service-oriented and we said…"if you need a new loan program, we'll develop it for you," and it would be running in a day or less, whereas the others would take weeks to do a program… if they ever got it done. The competition relied heavily on programmers to write a program that would print the form. Many had thousands of little programs that were running different forms, more often than not, it was a mess. We created a method of printing and filling forms which was superior in every way, and we could do it a lot faster. We immediately started to be asked to prepare other custom forms and include those in the package, too. Of course, we did because DSI's customer's always got whatever they asked for. The size of the document packages started to grow as lenders started adding in their own internal forms. They couldn't do that before as it had always been such a big deal; our competitors just wouldn't do it. All of a sudden we started to see 30-40% of the packages being customized. There was still a large percentage comprised of standard forms, but there was such a growing percentage of custom forms that we knew we were on to something...

Developing the Technology...

You can read about how the technology for DocMagic evolved in the next issue of The Compliance Wizard, in Part II of my interview with Don Iannitti.

Melanie A. Feliciano is Assistant General Counsel of Document Systems, Inc. and a member of its Compliance Department.