One of the most significant benefits Northern Tool has experienced with RingCentral is enabling mobility for its staff. “We have about 750 employees who were working in our Minnesota headquarters before COVID,” explains Rodney. “Because we had the RingCentral apps on our PCs and cell phones when the lockdowns started, we were able to transition everyone to working from home without slowing our operations at all.”
He adds: “Now our corporate employees can work just as efficiently and stay just as accessible to each other and our customers whether they come into the office or work remotely. And thanks to RingCentral’s built-in digital fax tool, employees can receive and process faxed orders just as quickly if they’re at home—something we’ve never been able to do before.”
On the retail side of Northern Tool’s operations, Rodney points out, RingCentral has provided significant benefits as well. “We’ve been able to build just the right telephony environment for our stores—automated greetings, extensions, physical phones—and repeat the process with very little effort anytime we open a new location. I just go into the RingCentral admin portal, order local lines and phones, and then basically do a copy-and-paste to create the telephony environment for the new store. It’s so easy, and it saves me an enormous amount of time.”
Another way RingCentral is supporting Northern Tool’s growth, Rodney notes, is with the platform’s call reporting and analytics. “The RingCentral data is great for several reasons. Our regional sales managers can pull reports to find patterns across their stores, such as when call traffic tends to be up or down. Our sales teams also use these reports to capture customer details, so we can send them relevant promotional information later.”
