Given all of the economic chaos COVID-19 has created, it would be difficult to find a time in recent history when more people were in need of financial assistance. But one of the ironies of the lockdowns is that they disrupted the operations of many financial services companies—just at the time when their customers needed them more than ever.
Fortunately for the thousands of customers of Union Home Mortgage, this award-winning lender has operated at full capacity since the quarantines began—in large part because the company had the foresight to implement the right cloud communications solution long before the pandemic. As such, the company was able to continue to go the extra mile for customers and make homeownership accessible for everyone.
A seamless remote-work transition
When Union Home Mortgage’s leadership team decided to close all of the company’s 175 offices around the country, the IT team knew they were well-positioned for a relatively seamless transition, because they rolled out RingCentral a year earlier.
Thanks to their RingCentral all-in-one cloud solution, the company’s 1,200 Partners were able to take and make business calls from any computer or smartphone, host video conferences, exchange SMS texts with customers, and send and receive digital faxes—all from a single platform and using one business number.
Still, though, UHM – like many other companies – had never before operated as a completely remote workforce. So, the tech team expected it to take a couple of weeks to transition the entire company to their new home-based working environments.
“Turns out, things went much smoother than anticipated,” says Mark Langhans, UHM’s Chief Information Officer. “We were 100% remote within a few business days. And there’s no way we could’ve done that without RingCentral.”
Amanda Coyne, the company’s IT Infrastructure Team Lead, points out that the RingCentral system is so easy to manage and operate that the company was able to quickly recreate communication workflows that its lending officers and other Partners were used to in the office.
Amanda explains: “For inbound sales calls, for example, our standard process is for those to route to assistants, who then transfer them to the appropriate lending officer. Because RingCentral’s phone system is so easy to use, we were able to recreate that same experience, even with everybody at home.”
Serving customers, and growing their business, in an unlikely time
As grateful as Union Home Mortgage was for the ability to adjust to the stay-home orders without disruptions to its operations, the company experienced far more benefits than just a smooth transition to remote work. In fact, UHM partially credits RingCentral with helping the company achieve its highest loan volume ever.
As Mark explains, the company is now setting production records each month. He says the company attributes a lot of this increase to larger factors, such as historically low interest rates and record-high demand for refinancing that resulted from the economic shutdown.
“But it’s also fair to attribute some of our recent success to RingCentral,” he says. “There’s no way we could’ve maintained our productivity and met all of the increased borrower demand without this communications solution—especially considering how much our operations would’ve been slowed and disrupted during the lockdowns if we didn’t have RingCentral.”
Originally published Dec 17, 2020, updated Dec 18, 2020