From Pain to Gain: Why UWM Moved to Opensense

March 9, 2021

The nation's largest mortgage lender, United Wholesale Mortgage, replaces their email signature solution with Opensense.
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Systems Administrator, Brent Schapman, manages UWM email signatures and spearheaded the switch from their existing email signature solution to Opensense: "We were looking for something hands-off and easily manageable."

During this time, the UWM team experienced several periods of downtime, dropped images, and difficulty getting hold of the overseas support team: "Our biggest pain with the previous signature solution was the fact that there was no simple way to upload our team headshots on signatures. It was a 100% manual effort. When you are hiring 500 people a week, you don't want to worry about uploading pictures or broken signatures. It motivated our team to research other solutions."

Shortly after, the IT team at UWM had come to realize that their solution was not robust or flexible enough to handle the scale they had hoped. Brent continues,"after researching other software, we came to realize that their tech was just not up to par with other solutions. That's where we learned about Opensense."

Brent and his team sought a signature solution that could:

1) be centrally controlled, and
2) sync in with their data directory

Through its ActiveSync with Azure, Opensense had that kind of flexibility. Brent adds, "this was important for me because I wanted to investigate and, if need be, very easily make changes to user attributes in real-time."

Soon after, the process of moving UWM onto Opensense was underway. Within a few weeks, the team noticed a considerable difference in the quality and capability of the Opensense signature solution: “Overall, the process from the kickoff call to the implementation and onboarding process was straightforward. I worked with Opensense's Implementation Team. They shared all of the information that I needed to ensure a smooth and successful transition," says Brent.

UWM was looking to transition thousands of employees. With this size of move, downtime is expected. According to Brent, this was not the case with Opensense: "We had roughly 8200 employees, and a few hundred contractors moved onto Opensense, and the scalability was there. We were able to move all of our team to Opensense with virtually no downtime." Unlike other solutions, Opensense's products meet enterprise-grade implementation and the highest integration standards.

Brent and his team at UWM had experienced their first few wins early on: "Since onboarding Opensense, we've had a lot of wins. One success story, in particular, was when we first rolled things out, we had a few 100 that had signature issues; we cleared the cache to drop old info and pick up a new one - usually, that's a 24-hour thing. As we worked through each user, we'd send over a list to the Opensense team to clear the cache. After a couple of days, we mentioned the desire to do this on our own without involving support, and within a couple of days, this capability was made possible;” Brent continues, "our team is ecstatic with the level of support and relationship we have built with the team. This is the kind of relationship you would hope for with a vendor and very different from the one we had prior."

The email signatures delivered via Opensense render consistently and beautifully on all major platforms, including iOS, Android, Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail. Opensense has given Brent and his team the ability to easily deliver on the brand experience he had always hoped for: "Overall, we are delighted we made the switch. No matter how big our team continues to grow, managing our team's signatures will not be an issue for us - in fact, they look even better than the ones we had before. The quality is just there. Our team has the peace of mind that with Opensense, we don't ever have to worry about email signatures again.”