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.