Using Data to Improve Customer Relationships and Build Trust
Precision agriculture companies that can deliver superior data intelligence and user-friendly products arm their customers with an invaluable tool: the ability to make smart, informed decisions in real time.
By Karli Petrovic
Throughout the business world, every company, regardless of what it is selling and to whom, is tasked proving that its products and services are better than the competition. These solutions must be reliable, save time, and provide value.
This is particularly important in precision agriculture where data are used to help the farming sector ramp up production and sustainably feed the world’s increasing population. Growers and ranchers have little patience for so-called solutions that interfere with their ability to make educated, real-time decisions. As customers, they want the information that will have the greatest impact on their operations. Precision ag companies that hope to foster long-term business relationships built on trust must deliver the data to support these needs in a quick, seamless, and user-friendly way.
“The secret to creating solutions that delight your customers is to really understand their story, what they’re trying to do in the field, and all the most important information they need to see simultaneously in order to make smart decisions,” says Katherine Crawford, operations director at Skyward App Company, a systems integrator and custom software developer used by global suppliers and retailers. “I haven’t helped someone if I don’t provide them with the most useful information at the exact time they need it to solve a problem.”
Developing Data-Based Solutions with Customers in Mind
In addition to helping customers access the right information at the right time, precision ag providers should be mindful of showing their work. User interfaces that are simple, intuitive, and easy to operate can sometimes mask the scope, complexity, and intricacies of the data behind them. Customers want to know that tools, applications and recommendations are based on superior data intelligence and sound science.
“I think producers sometimes feels like they throw their information into a vacuum and hope that what comes back is useful,” Crawford says. “There’s a lot of value in being able to show them how their data is being consumed or used. If you submitted a survey to a company, for example, you would want to see changes based on what you submitted. Producers are no different, and they’re also really busy people. Companies want to be able to make the data useful for them.”
Achieving the balance between collecting and analyzing a massive amount of information and showcasing the most important data points can be challenging. For Advanced Agrilytics, a precision agriculture company that provides farmers with actionable, customized strategies to optimize their operations, the problem centered on being able to consolidate a customer’s ag data, show the value of that data to make recommendations, and deliver it in a concise format. Skyward Apps stepped in to help.
“We have a lot of complicated algorithms that we use inside our company,” says Libba Stanford, director of data strategy at Advanced Agrilytics. “If a grower has to go into a website and read all those things, it’s a whole lot of extra work for that person. In working with Skyward, we were able to deliver a mobile application that would share exactly what we were doing and where we were going to be doing it and from when we were going to be doing it.”
The new application not only exposed the complexity of the behind-the-scenes work, but it also empowered users to see the value of this data and use it to inform their work. Advanced Agrilytics’ grower customers could make high-impact decisions faster than ever before.
“With the app, we were able to start delivering prescriptions to their phones for them to review,” Stanford says. “Now, growers can see all of their data layers, and they can get scouting recommendations, meaning that when we have someone on their farm and there is an immediate need or issue that needed to be addressed, we can send a notification from the field right to the grower’s phone.”
Creating Trust with Valid Data
In working with Skyward Apps to find the right solution for its customers, Advanced Agrilytics found a way to address one of the biggest issues in precision ag: dirty data.
Simply put, dirty data refers to data that contain erroneous information. If a farmer is driving his GPS-enabled tractor through the field but breaks for lunch, information is still being gathered for the 30 minutes when the tractor is stopped. The lunch-time data will need to be removed from the overall data set before the tractor data can be used to make recommendations or inform real-time decisions. Building effective data-based products requires this level of detailed consideration.
“Today, a lot of companies will display data in a way that makes a beautiful map, but when you try to utilize that data to make real decisions from it, it doesn’t always have the element it needs or the data is really dirty and needs a lot of clean-up or it may be impartial, and that map you’re looking at has just been filled in to make it look good,” Stanford says. “I think the trust part comes from being able to show people what is real versus perception.”
Ultimately, every company throughout the ag supply chain must find their own way to convince retailers, agronomists, and trusted advisors that a lot of data went into their recommendations. Long-term business relationships depend on developing solutions that customers recognize, appreciate and trust.
“I think the more data that we are able to utilize from growers in a standard, integrated way is going to build their trust long-term,” Stanford says. “I’ve seen it happen over the past couple years with some of our grower customers that we’ve had for a long time. The more we educate them on their data across the board for their entire enterprise, the more they tend to trust us with what we’re doing as well.”