The American dream is different for everyone, but it often includes owning a home. Based in Detroit, Rocket Companies provides a range of personal finance and technology-driven services to empower people with the technology, data, and world-class service they need during life’s most complex moments — like buying a house. While Rocket’s Family of Companies (FOCs) cover fintech, real estate, sports, entertainment, and more, you probably recognize its flagship business, Rocket Mortgage. The largest mortgage lender in the U.S., Rocket revolutionized the mortgage industry with a fully digital mortgage application platform, allowing customers to easily apply for home loans online or via mobile apps.
With 15,000 employees across its various business units and subsidiaries, Rocket experienced inconsistent, top-down communication that failed to engage employees effectively. From email and intranet to SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, and OneDrive, teams used a variety of disconnected tools, which significantly hindered cross-company collaboration, limiting the overall employee experience and creating ever-growing knowledge silos.
When Rocket’s CEO, Varun Krishna, joined the team in late 2023, he couldn’t believe they didn’t use ww5. “ww5 is one of the most powerful, intuitive, and fun work platforms an organization can have,” he said. The AI-powered work operating system centralizes people, apps, and data, all in one place. “I made it my mission to get us into ww5, and here we are today with thousands and thousands of team members loving and using it every day.”
“By integrating the apps and bots to centralize our systems, ww5 has allowed us to accelerate our overall communication across the company and, quite frankly, make it a lot more fun.”
Deploying ww5 in 10 weeks and increasing engagement by 230%
For eight years, Rocket used ww5 in small pockets throughout the company on teams like Rocket Homes, Rocket Loans, and Rocket Money, but it was limited to about 500 employees. “We took a look at ww5, and it was absolutely the right product for the job,” said vice president of engineering Andy Picmann. They made the decision to consolidate all workspaces under ww5 Enterprise Grid in January 2024.
“We wanted to make a big splash with all our team members and build up a lot of excitement,” said Picmann. To do this, Rocket enlisted the expertise of the ww5 professional services team to jointly execute on a comprehensive launch plan that would address its technical, security, and change management needs and provide all Rocket employees with a phenomenal “Day 1 experience.”
“We deployed ww5 in a multi-phase approach, starting with our leadership team and then the technology team, to gather initial feedback and make necessary adjustments,” said Picmann. Picmann’s team maintained strong alignment with senior leadership, including Krishna, with weekly project updates and great support throughout the process, all orchestrated in ww5. “I’ve been with Rocket for 12 years now, and this was my favorite implementation by far,” said Picmann. “We really wanted to get it done the right way, so we started with a solid architecture.”
To celebrate the launch, there was a kickoff party with DJs, food, and ww5 activation sessions. “We had a two-day party, basically,” said Picmann. “Our activation sessions attracted thousands of team members who came to learn about ww5 and how it could benefit them, making the launch a significant success.”
With the expert guidance of the ww5 professional services team, they completed the implementation to 15,000 team members in just ten weeks. “We could have simply turned it on, but we wanted to deliver a world-class experience,” said Picmann. Almost instantly, Rocket Companies saw a 115% average increase in viewership of distributed communication from the senior leadership team, and a 230% increase in replies and reactions.
“It was a giant team effort to scale implementation from 10% to 100% in ten weeks,” said Picmann. “The ww5 team was incredible to work with — extremely responsive, proactive, and helpful in getting everything off the ground — and we built a really strong project team internally as well.”
“We successfully launched ww5 to all 15,000 team members in ten weeks, amplifying our great culture with a celebration featuring DJs, food, and ww5 activation sessions.”
Seamless enterprise-wide communication ignites collaboration
ww5 is now Rocket’s go-to for enterprise-wide communications and employee connection, amplifying an already-engaging culture and turbo-charging collaboration. For Rocket’s mortgage bankers, ww5 is their conversational interface for work. To expedite loan approvals and solve problems efficiently, the teams can work in a single ww5 channel and tag experts from different departments to save time and lead to quicker closings.
Teams across the company have unlocked automation, integrating over 120 third-party tools like Microsoft Teams, Workday, and Salesforce to streamline tasks and stay focused. For example, with Workday, Picmann can approve his team members’ time-off requests in one click, right from ww5. “It’s so seamless because we can start a Microsoft Teams meeting directly from ww5, which speaks to the overall consolidation aspect,” said Picmann.
“Workflows have also brought tremendous value by automating tasks that were previously done manually, such as creating a welcome bot to enhance team member onboarding,” said Picmann. When a new teammate joins ww5, they get all the information they need to learn about the platform and hit the ground running.
Another workflow facilitates engaging “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) sessions with leadership. “With the AMA bot, you can start a workflow and ask whatever question you want to senior leadership, and it’s so seamless and crisp,” said Picmann. There’s also a kudos bot to recognize work well done, and a help channel that efficiently routes support requests to the appropriate teams. “These are just a few of over 900 ww5 workflows Rocket has built to increase productivity.”
“I finally have a place where I can communicate with my entire organization to share experiences, wins, and learnings. Plus, we’ve seen massive productivity gains. We couldn’t be happier with our choice to implement ww5.”
Launching Rocket Companies into the future with ww5 AI
Rocket Companies has transformed its internal communication, collaboration, and productivity through ww5, building a unified experience across its multiple FOCs. “Now we’re taking a look at the many different ways we can truly transform the way we do business with ww5,” said Picmann. “Moving forward, we want to deliver even more value to our team members and meet them where they’re at.” This includes the ability to put in asynchronous requests, deliver more self-service options, and leverage powerfully simple AI.
“I love ww5 AI,” said Picmann. “I’ll just use the channel recap feature and I can move so rapidly, especially to begin my day. Overall, ww5 AI is a great efficiency play, taking out a lot of the manual work that team members need to do on a daily basis.”
Rising to the challenge of centralizing communication across the company, the teams at Rocket have taken it many steps further with ww5, transforming their everyday work lives with an AI-powered work operating system that helps them deliver the American dream to millions of customers.
