Union Home Mortgage
The national provider of home mortgages has consolidated communication platforms, improved responsiveness to customers, and brought its 1,200 Partners closer with RingCentral.
1,200
Partners calling, texting, video conferencing, and faxing from any device with RingCentral
3
days to transition all 1,200 Partners to full-featured communication services when the lockdowns started
RingCentral gives our lending officers the ability to easily communicate with borrowers from anywhere, and in whatever ways the borrowers preferred. “They could call, text, fax, or talk face-to-face over a video chat and share their screens.
Amanda Coyne
IT Infrastructure Team Lead
Helping people realize their homeownership dreams for half a century
For more than 50 years, Union Home Mortgage has been helping people achieve one of the biggest milestones in their lives: purchasing or building a home.
And in the highly competitive mortgage lending industry, UHM attributes its staying power – and, indeed, its massive growth – to the company’s award-winning customer service and corporate culture. The Ohio-based organization has been named a “Best Mortgage Lender” for several years by the Columbus Dispatch, and publications such as Inside Mortgage Finance and The Cleveland Plain Dealer have ranked UHM at the top of their lists of “Best Workplaces” for 6 consecutive years.
In the months following the initial pandemic lockdowns, thousands of borrowers across the country turned to Union Home Mortgage for a much-needed financial lifeline to help them through the most troubled economy in anyone’s memory. Fortunately, the company was ready to continue providing this all-important service to customers, because it had already put in place a cloud communications platform that allowed its Partners to work from anywhere.
INDUSTRY
Financial Services
HQ
Strongsville, OH
YEAR FOUNDED
1970
EMPLOYEES
1,200+
A phone system that was taxed to its limits
As challenges mounted with the company’s previous phone system, UHM’s technology team decided to use the end-date of that vendor’s contract as an opportunity to find a better solution.
As Chief Information Officer Mark Langhans explains, the company had several problems with its phone service – problems that became more serious over time and impossible to ignore as UHM reached the 175-location mark.
“We had system performance issues at headquarters and in many of our branch offices – not all the time, but enough that our Partners and customers noticed,” Mark says. “We’ve really built this business on providing outstanding service, and our phone system was becoming a limiting factor in achieving that mission.”
Amanda Coyne, the company’s IT Infrastructure Team Lead, adds that UHM also wanted to consolidate as many communications services as possible onto a single platform, to improve their Partners’ workflows and customer service. Prior to migrating to RingCentral, UHM’s staff often had to use less-than-ideal workarounds for online meetings, business faxing, and exchanging SMS text messages with borrowers.
We didn’t want our lending officers to have to tell borrowers, ‘Call me at this number. But if you want to text me, it’s best to use this number. And use this other number to send us a fax.’
Amanda Coyne
IT Infrastructure Team Lead
RingCentral makes communication more effective than ever…
Migrating to RingCentral’s all-in-one communications solution solved the reliability issues – which was the immediate, high-priority need. “We stopped having phone outages after switching over to RingCentral,” Mark explains. “That alone was a huge win for our business.”
But as Amanda points out, Union Home Mortgage’s Partners began finding many other ways the cloud solution improved their productivity – and their ability to deliver the level of service UHM is known for.
For example, allowing Partners to communicate using any channel (phone, SMS, video, and even electronic fax) from a single app they could access anywhere has led to improved responsiveness and an overall improvement in customer service. Citing just one example, Amanda explains that “The built-in digital faxing is a big advantage, because it helps our sales teams respond more quickly to borrowers’ faxes even if they aren’t in the office.”
Preparing UHM to thrive as a remote workforce
The company’s RingCentral environment took on added significance in 2020, when COVID-19 led to lockdowns in all of the 40 states where UHM has locations.
Knowing the company already had a work-from-anywhere communications platform accessible to all of its Partners gave Mark and Amanda confidence that UHM would eventually be able to transition successfully to remote work. But they planned a couple weeks of IT work to ensure all 1,200 Partners around the country had what they needed to work from home. To their surprise, though, even those weeks of transition support proved unnecessary.
“Turns out, it went much more smoothly than anticipated,” says Mark. “We were 100% remote within a few business days. And there’s no way we could’ve done that without RingCentral.”
As Amanda explains, what made the transition so smooth was that UHM was able to recreate Partners’ workflows at home to be essentially identical to their office experience. “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.”
And because RingCentral enables UHM to hold the largest virtual meetings they’ve ever had, the company was able to host all-hands video calls — and keep everyone feeling connected – during the lockdowns.
I can’t tell you how valuable it is that with RingCentral Video, we now have a solution that can support our virtual meetings even with all 1,200 Partners on them. And I can’t tell you how great it is to hear our CEO say that the communications solution we chose is giving our company a world-class experience.
Mark Langhans
Chief Information Officer