With nearly 100 employees across seven states, Crop Quest has an incredibly remote-work-friendly team that’s scattered across the country. You wouldn’t know it, though, from how smoothly the business runs and how in sync the team is.
We chatted with Tracy, Crop Quest’s Recruiting Coordinator, and Corry, its HR & Marketing Specialist, to learn about how the business can work so seamlessly with so many employees in different locations.
👀 Does managing a small business need to be this hard? Nope. Learn from your peers and grab our eBook to dive into five small business success stories.
Seven states, one phone line
To stay connected with almost 100 people across the country, Crop Quest uses RingCentral—”it makes things seamless,” says Tracy.
The cool thing is not all of Crop Quest’s office staff is even located in its office in Kansas. “Our administrative manager is actually in another state,” says Tracy. “Our phone system is connected with her, and we can buzz right over like she’s in the office next to us, even though she’s clear across the nation.”
And it’s not just employees that the Crop Quest team is using RingCentral to have conversations with. “We can connect with our employees and, just as importantly, our customers as well,” says Corry. “Not just within the seven states, but also internationally—and our vendors too!”
Taking meetings to a whole new (national) level
Another feature Crop Quest loves using is RingCentral’s meeting app. The team has weekly meetings with the office staff as well as the different divisions within the company.
“We use the video chat on our meetings, since we’re so spread out and it’s not feasible to bring everyone together all the time,” says Tracy. “But RingCentral lets us get together, stay up to date with what we have going on, and share what’s going on.”
And because Crop Quest wants to be flexible with the team’s workdays and schedules, having RingCentral’s mobile app has been a game changer:
I think the nice thing about RingCentral is the mobility,” says Corry. “You can use it on any device—you can be home with your sick kid and not miss a beat.
A phone system that does employee training too? Yep, it exists
Sure, Crop Quest uses RingCentral for calls and meetings, like most businesses do. But they’ve also found a way to make staff training and development easier.
“We do a lot of training and development with our staff, and we use the screenshare in RingCentral to train our employees,” says Corry.
That’s not the only cool thing the team is doing either. “One of the things we do that’s pretty innovative is that we just started a podcast actually: The Turnrow,” says Corry.
We use RingCentral as the base of the recording for the podcast, and it’s been critical because we have three different hosts in three different locations in two different states. So RingCentral’s been key to us launching the podcast!
We love seeing how companies are getting creative with using RingCentral as not only a foundation of keeping everyone connected, but also to spark new and exciting projects like The Turnrow.
I don’t think we’d be where we’re at today without RingCentral. It’s just opened up a lot of doors for our business.
Thanks, Crop Quest, Tracy, and Corry!
🤯 You could save up to $400 an hour in IT costs.
Explore the RingCentral Advantage for small businesses:
💰 You can also use this calculator to see roughly how much your business could save by using RingCentral to support your team’s communications with clients, customers, and each other.
Originally published Mar 25, 2020, updated Feb 24, 2022