Gempler’s
Gempler’s Implements RingCentral and Benefits with 28% Quicker Speed to Answer and 70% Fewer Abandoned Calls
28%
quicker to answer customer support calls since migrating to RingCentral Contact Center
70%
reduction in abandoned support calls since rolling out contact center
59%
faster response time to customer support emails
As an eCommerce company in an Amazon world, we differentiate ourselves with outstanding customer service. RingCentral Contact Center helps us do that better than ever.
Carl Atwell
Owner & President
Supplying the people who keep America green and growing
When the pandemic led to supply-chain disruptions and food shortages in 2020, that frightening experience reminded us how much the world depends on the people who grow our food. And for more than 80 years, those hard working heroes—small farmers, orchard operators, nursery owners—have depended on Gempler’s.
A family-owned, nationwide supplier to farms, agricultural small businesses, landscapers, and others who work outdoors, Gempler’s offers everything from tools and equipment, to gardening supplies, to safety gear, to clothing and footwear.
Since the company was acquired a couple of years ago, it has experienced substantial growth. As the Gempler’s eCommerce storefront has attracted a significant increase in traffic and demand for products, the company’s customer support team has also seen its call volume steadily increase.
One of the company’s key differentiators is its friendly customer service agents and the outstanding customer experience they provide in every interaction. But as support inquiries increased across channels—including phone and email—the company found its communications infrastructure unable to deliver the unmatched level of service it promised customers.
A communications platform that was dying on the vine
When Gempler’s was acquired in 2019, the company rolled out a cloud-based telephony solution. Debbie Holmquist, the company’s Director of Customer Service & Distribution, notes that the system was sufficient at first but soon ran into challenges, especially as the company grew.
“We had an ongoing problem with outages,” Debbie says. “But as our team got bigger and customer demand kept increasing, we realized the system had other constraints as well. It wasn’t good at skills-based routing, for example. It also didn’t have much in the way of reporting, analytics, or monitoring capabilities.”
Carl Atwell, Owner & President of Gempler’s, points out that although the team’s initial focus was to find a more reliable solution, they decided to use the opportunity to improve operations as well. “As we researched Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solutions… and, more specifically, when we discovered RingCentral… we realized we could do a lot more than just solve the outage problem,” he says.
Whether we’re talking about RingEX or Contact Center, RingCentral is having a wide and deep positive impact on our business—and on our customers’ lives. That means everything to us.
Debbie Holmquist
Director of Customer Service & Distribution
INDUSTRY
Retail
HQ
Janesville, WI
YEAR FOUNDED
1939
EMPLOYEES
60
RingCentral yields a bumper crop of business-enhancing features
Gempler’s rolled out a suite of integrated cloud solutions from RingCentral—including RingEX for making and taking business calls on any device, RingCentral Contact Center for omnichannel customer service, and RingCentral Meetings for online collaboration and video conferencing.
“Contact Center lets us integrate our support emails into the same unified platform as our support calls and chats,” says Debbie. “For the first time, we were able to route emails to agents just as we do with phone calls—and not by asking agents to respond to them in Outlook, as we did before. That feature alone has significantly improved our email response time and made our agents more efficient overall.”
Debbie also points out that Contact Center’s callback feature is having a tremendously positive impact on both agents and customers. “During our peak times of the year, when we’re handling 13,000 calls a month, it’s great to give our customers the option to ask for a callback instead of waiting on hold,” she says. “Our key differentiator is outstanding service, so it’s invaluable to be able to give our customers more choice and convenience in how they engage with us.”
Since we moved to RingCentral Contact Center, our agents are 28% faster to answer customer service calls, and they’ve cut their average email response time by more than half.
Debbie Holmquist
Director of Customer Service & Distribution
Carl adds: “We’re able to make and take calls on our business numbers from any computer or even on our own smartphones using the RingCentral mobile app. And thanks to RingCentral Meetings, we’re functioning more like a team, even though we’re all in different locations.”
Carl also points out another major operational improvement the team is enjoying thanks to RingCentral Meetings: “We used to share two conference bridges across the entire company,” he says. “That led to continuous scheduling conflicts and having to ask if a bridge was available. “I remember asking the RingCentral team how many lines we’d have for conference calls. They said: ‘Everyone will have their own.’ And I thought, ‘Okay, that’ll work!’”
And as Debbie explains, the support team is also finding ways to improve operations using the call recording feature:
It’s easy to access recorded calls in Contact Center, so we listen to them all the time. When we hear one that an agent handled really well, we’ll send it around as a model for other agents to follow.
Debbie Holmquist
Director of Customer Service & Distribution
And they’ve only begun to cultivate their RingCentral solution
Debbie, Carl, and the rest of the management team at Gempler’s have found RingCentral and RingCentral Contact Center so feature-rich that they are still discovering new tools and capabilities in the solution.
“I see so much potential in RingCentral’s reporting and analytics,” says Debbie. “As we start using those tools, that information is going to give us so many valuable business insights—not only for our customer service team but also to improve the whole company. We’re going to be able to learn, for example, what products our customers are asking about, and when certain types of products get more or fewer inquiries.”
As Carl says: “We’re probably leveraging only about 10% of the tools available to us in RingCentral. There’s so much more we plan to do with this solution—to improve our business, our quality of service, and the lives of our employees and customers.”
Contact Center is making a real difference in our business. It’s helping us measure the customer experience, figure out where we’re succeeding, and where we need to improve.
Carl Atwell
Owner & President