Supporting dramatic growth and boosting efficiency with 8x8

Founded in 2008, Movement Mortgage was named by Inc. Magazine as the fastest-growing mortgage bank in the country, increasing its workforce from just four to over 4,000 today. Ranked among the top ten purchase lenders in the United States, the company finances one in every 60 home purchases in the country, totaling more than $13 billion in originations.

Growing Pains

Movement Mortgage’s rapid growth brought some challenges: The company outgrew its legacy telephone system and transitioned to a self-hosted hybrid environment of multiple hosting providers and carriers. With over 650 locations across the United States, the patchwork system had latency issues, poor voice quality and dropped calls. Customer service was adversely impacted, as well as the company’s overall ability to scale. The burden on the internal IT team’s productivity also was significant: It was estimated that 20 percent of the group’s time was spent handling phone-related issues.

Cam Lawler, enterprise applications director at Movement Mortgage, elaborated, “The quality of our legacy system was miserable. Speed of communication is critical for us and team members just couldn’t reach each other quickly. It was obvious that we needed a solution that would help us to offer exceptional customer service, as well as deliver simplified management and improved workflows.”

Interconnectivity in the Cloud

Movement Mortgage executed an extensive competitive review, including consulting Gartner Magic Quadrant ratings, and decided to replace its communications systems with the 8x8 Virtual Office cloud business telephone system. The company’s operation centers and over 650 branches, which previously functioned as independent units, are now interconnected across one cloud communications platform, with a single provider and consolidated billing for all of its communication services.

The impact of 8x8 Virtual Office opened up a legion of benefits associated with deploying an industry-leading communications solution. “We saw the big positive impact that 8x8 made to our organization, so we added 8x8 Virtual Contact Center to bring even more rigor and efficiency to our internal communications,” recalled Lawler.

He continued, “Some of the heaviest users are in our Rate Lock Group: They work directly with loan officers to finalize rates for our loans. The exchange of information between the two teams is obviously a core function for us. With 8x8 we now have full visibility into this process and can measure and tune individual performances to ensure that this critical business operation is running optimally.”

Supporting Mobility

Movement Mortgage leverages multiple 8x8 features to further enhance the efficiency of its team. With single number outreach, employees enjoy having one phone number work across several devices, including desk phone, laptop, and mobile. “Our loan officers are extremely mobile and continually take advantage of the ‘follow me’ capability,” noted Lawler. “Although our own staff turnover is well below the industry average of 40% annual churn, we do have a continual inflow of new hires but we now have the capability to ship out a phone, have the employee plug it in, and immediately be productive. This is really key for us.”

He added, “With the simplified plug-and-play portability we get with 8x8, physical inventory is now easy to control and IT management is very straightforward.” Having a single corporate phone directory also saves the IT team valuable time and makes inter-office communications easy.

Multiple Capabilities from 8x8

Lawler reflected, “Having our unified communications and contact center solutions from the same vendor has been really great. Administration can be performed from a single console, so even with an environment of our size and complexity, management is simple and efficient. The combination of 8x8 Virtual Office and 8x8 Virtual Contact Center allows us to scale quickly and deliver outstanding customer service by enabling agents to effortlessly collaborate with anyone in the organization.

He continued, “8x8 enables us to elevate employee efficiency and ensure that company-wide communications actually add value to the business, rather than detracting like it used to with our legacy system.”

Movement Mortgage CEO Casey Crawford summarized; “When we looked into revamping our communications infrastructure, it was imperative for us to find a partner that had experience supporting businesses of our size and scale, with distributed and mobile workforce requirements. 8x8 fits the bill perfectly.”