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8x8 to Install Virtual Office at 400 Movement Mortgage Locations

By Casey Houser
Contributing Writer

8x8 (News - Alert) offers its cloud-based Virtual Meeting suite to those businesses that want to upgrade their communications packages; 8x8 calls it the “one unified suite for continuous communications.” The latest client to jump on that train is Movement Mortgage, which has risen from the ground to reach more than 3,500 employees in eight short years.

Movement Mortgage has grown so quickly since its humble beginning in 2008 – when it comprised only four staff members – that it outgrew its legacy communications system, moved to a self-built hybrid system that included many vendors’ products, and outgrew that setup as well. It needed something new that would provide all the functionality of its multi-vendor setup without the hassle of keeping it connected and running. Company CEO, Casey Crawford, commented on the growth the burgeoning mortgage company experiences each month and the technical difficulties it found in previous communications setups.

“We are averaging about 200 new employees per month, and with a number of inter-branch transfers we need to get people up and running with seamless desktop and mobile communications immediately,” Crawford said. “Our legacy system made it difficult to efficiently handle personnel changes and affected our productivity. 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 fit the bill perfectly.”

Virtual Office brings together phone services such as a hosted private branch exchange, instant messaging, and presence alongside contact center features and tools for virtual meetings. Earlier this year, 8x8 announced that it had updated the capability of its office suite by bringing support for virtual meetings to the whole. Officially called Virtual Office Meetings, the application give users the power to schedule meetings and transition from instant messages into online meetings with just one click.

Surely to Movement Mortgage’s liking, the entire Virtual Office suite brings together these features on the desktop and on mobile. It allows individual users to log in to the main system and access every tool within, so there is no more management of multiple logins and passwords. A single phone number and username for each user can also stretch across applications and devices.

It appears the project is in its early stages. When it has finished, four operations centers and more than 400 Movement Mortgage branches should find their communications system completely linked and much easier to use and maintain.