Gempler’s call center quickly becomes virtual with help from Ooma.

When your business relies on phone orders, your call center can’t go offline – even when a pandemic shuts down your corporate office.

Carl Atwell, president of Gempler’s faced exactly that challenge last month.

Gempler’s provides essential supplies to farmers, nurseries, landscapers and other outdoor businesses, with half of orders originating online and half coming through a call center at the main office in Janesville, Wisconsin.

“Customer service is how we differentiate from big online retailers,” Atwell says. Many of his agents are farmers or growers themselves, so customers often rely on them to make recommendations on what products they need and how to use them.

On Thursday, March 19, Atwell responded to the coronavirus outbreak by telling employees in the Janesville office who could work from home to do so. He wanted the 14-person call center team to start taking calls remotely on Monday, March 23, and had them take their IP phones and desktop PCs home with them.

Atwell then called the support team at Ooma Enterprise, which provides Gempler’s cloud-based phone system. “I needed help fast,” Atwell says. “Ooma understood the plea of an entrepreneur whose business was at risk.”

Petra Alec, an Ooma technical support specialist, immediately swung into action, walking

Gempler’s agents through the steps to reconfigure their phones for connecting from home. Working non-stop from Friday through Sunday, Petra got all the agents’ phones reconnected.

On Monday morning, all Gempler’s agents were back on the phones. With the cloud-based dashboards and reporting tools in Ooma Enterprise, managers didn’t miss a beat.

“People want to do business with other people, which is why our call center is so important,” Atwell concludes. “I very much appreciate the effort from Ooma, during a time when they were slammed with customer request of their own, to do what needed to be done to keep Gempler’s talking with our customers.”