AgCountry
RingCentral Helps AgCountry Farm Credit Services Speed its Workflows by Hundreds of Hours Each Month
90%+
time saved using RingCentral texting for daily tasks such as setting appointments
1
centrally managed cloud phone system improves communications at 45 branch offices across the Midwest
Some of our employees want desk phones and others just want to use their mobile phones for business calls. Some need business texting capability. Still others prefer to do their business calls and texts right from their Microsoft Teams environment. What’s great about RingCentral is that it allows for every one of these preferences, and it means our employees can always be accessible to our customers.
Brian McDonald
Vice President of IT, AgCountry
Serving the businesses that keep our food supply healthy and plentiful
When they need credit, tax planning, crop insurance, and other financial services, farmers throughout rural America know they can turn to the experts at AgCountry Farm Credit Services.
Part of the Farm Credit System, a nationwide network of cooperative organizations specializing in agricultural lending, AgCountry offers a wide range of business services to farmers, ranchers, and agribusinesses. The company serves more than 25,000 customers in North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.
INDUSTRY
Financial services
HQ
Fargo, ND
YEAR FOUNDED
1984
EMPLOYEES
700+
On-prem phone infrastructure became increasingly problematic
As AgCountry’s VP of IT Brian McDonald explains, the company’s aging telephony created an operational challenge that continued to grow as the organization expanded and added more branch locations throughout the Midwest.
“We had an outdated phone infrastructure with on-prem hardware, several telco contracts for local business lines in the various regions where we operate, and not much ability to centrally manage or support our phone services at our 45 local branches.” Lori Labahn, an AgCountry IT Analyst, adds that the disjointed telephony infrastructure regularly undermined the company’s operations.
Because the system was complicated and difficult to manage, it was always a challenge to make what should’ve been simple changes, like adding employees to our phone environment, updating a branch’s voicemail greeting, or redirecting calls to another location whenever severe weather forced us to close an office.
Lori Labahn
IT Analyst, AgCountry
Creating efficiencies with modern, flexible cloud communications
As they began rolling out RingCentral, Brian and Lori were pleased to see various teams across the company experiencing significant operational improvements almost immediately.
“One of the first major improvements we saw was the ability to easily direct calls anywhere nearly instantly,” explains Lori. “I can go into the RingCentral admin portal and in just a few clicks route calls going to one of our Minnesota branches back here to a call queue at headquarters or another branch. That means when a blizzard closes some of our offices, we can make sure within minutes that those branches’ customers can still reach us.”
Brian adds that AgCountry’s support staff also quickly started making use of RingCentral’s built-in SMS texting capability to significantly cut the time spent on several of their everyday workflows.
Let’s say one of our employees has 50 appointments to schedule or remind the customer about. Before RingCentral, these were all phone calls – and with small talk, missed calls, and voicemails, each contact might average 5 minutes. That’s 4 hours of calls, or half a day. Now that they can just text the info through RingCentral using their business number, those contacts take 5 seconds, or less than 15 minutes to get through all 50.
Brian McDonald
Vice President of IT, AgCountry
A surprisingly seamless migration
Although they anticipated setbacks and challenges common during any large-scale IT implementation, Brian and Lori were thrilled at how smoothly the process went as they migrated AgCountry’s headquarters and all 45 branch locations onto RingCentral.
“I give a lot of the credit to our support teams at RingCentral for making the transition so painless,” says Brian. “The training they gave us was excellent. Porting our numbers went mostly smoothly as well – with the exception of a couple of uncooperative telcos. But even that didn’t cause much trouble because RingCentral just gave us new local numbers to cover those areas.”
Lori adds: “RingCentral’s admin portal is so straightforward and intuitive that I was able to figure out pretty quickly how to manage the system and make updates myself, which is a huge improvement over our old environment. And whenever my team has had questions about the system, the RingCentral support team has always been right there to help us.”
Improving operations in additional ways
As Brain points out, being able to give every AgCountry employee a direct business number they can access from anywhere – including through the RingCentral mobile app on their personal phones – has created additional benefits.
“For our industry, farmers and ranchers, local business numbers are very important. One of the benefits of RingCentral is that it’s easy to give every customer-facing employee not only their own direct number but also a number local to their territory – which helps build trust and confidence among their customers.”
Additionally, Brian notes, RingCentral makes it possible to have those customer calls much more easily when AgCountry’s loan officers, tax specialists, and other reps are on the road. “Our old system had some capability to bridge a business call to a cell phone, but it was difficult and required the caller to connect with a customer service agent in the office first. With RingCentral, our reps can now easily make or receive those calls directly on their personal cell phones – which means they can be more accessible to customers even if they’re not in the office.”
Finally, Lori discovered an unexpected benefit with the RingCentral reporting and analytics dashboard.
An employee asked if I could produce a report showing the call queues she’d joined and the number of calls she had answered – for her performance review. Because RingCentral’s reporting dashboard makes it so easy to pull granular data, I was able to give her the details she wanted right away. She was so grateful. That’s one example of how we’re using RingCentral analytics to gain insights we never could with our old system.
Lori Labahn
IT Analyst, AgCountry