The evolving business of agriculture
Agriculture is often associated with producers in quiet, rural areas and is sometimes incorrectly perceived as a sector with limited influence on the global stage. However, the industry remains one of the most important in the world, and it's growing rapidly.
Recognizing the opportunities in the agriculture sector, many startups and established businesses are focusing on innovative projects, such as developing crop management software, implementing new farming techniques, and optimizing their operations with predictive analytics powered by artificial intelligence.
These advancements aim to enhance productivity, sustainability, and profitability in the agriculture sector. By combining traditional farming practices with cutting-edge technology, the agriculture industry is poised to play a more significant role in addressing global food security challenges and contributing to economic development.
Some of the significant reasons why the agriculture sector will continue to see steady growth in demand—both for production and technological innovation.
Population growth: The global population is estimated to reach 9 billion by 2050. This is one of the major reasons why agricultural producers will face a mix of challenges and opportunities in the years ahead.
Consumer preferences: Rising demand for food products associated with a healthy lifestyle is driving the need for innovation in the agriculture sector. As awareness of different dietary options increases through health education and social promotion, consumers are searching for a wider range of healthy food choices.
Urbanization: Due to the ongoing shift from rural areas to urban cities, production and distribution chains in agriculture have become more complex. This necessitates new approaches to managing customer relationships at all levels of the industry.
Businesses in the industry should be educated on how technology can help them reach their full potential. Production and sales often get the most attention, but marketing and support activities are equally essential for success—both in business and the industry's unique mission of feeding people worldwide. In this blog, we'll specifically look at how Zoho Desk's tech capabilities can enhance support processes and help agriculture businesses retain more satisfied customers.
Customer support in the agriculture sector
From farms to grocery stores, restaurants, and direct sales to consumers, businesses have to provide support for their customers in the distribution chain. This includes answering questions about the shelf life of products, confirming ways to store certain products, providing assistance in selecting products, negotiating prices, etc. The same is true of other suppliers and service providers, such as farming equipment vendors and logistics providers.
We spoke to Bianca Bento regarding the challenges her company is facing in the agriculture sector. She is the client experience manager at NOOA Brasil, which is an agribusiness that focuses on making productive and balanced Brazilian lands using sustainable organic technologies. She said:
The biggest challenge in customer experience often starts within the company. While skilled, motivated employees are essential, they can’t succeed without the right tools. Many companies overlook this, leading to frustration, low morale, and poor service.
Delivering great CX requires more than good intentions—it needs well-equipped teams, supported by technology that helps them understand and connect with every type of customer.
After considerable evaluation, NOOA Brasil chose Zoho Desk, one of the leading custom-aware ticketing systems, for its advanced customization and required features such as Zia's sentiment analysis, CSAT, customer happiness and other features to understand customers better.
Zoho Desk: A platform to enhance customer experience
More than 110 organizations, in the agriculture sector, across the globe, use Zoho Desk to deliver enhanced customer experience. Here are some of the features that they use to increase the efficiency of their customer support process.
Integration between Zoho Desk and Zoho Voice
In many Asian countries, some farmers may have limited literacy skills, which can make text-based communication challenging. In those cases, the support agents can manually raise tickets within Zoho Desk, which can help in managing customer interactions smoothly. And, integrating with Zoho Voice using PhoneBridge can help support agents call farmers directly from within the platform. The call activities are automatically logged against the respective tickets.
Email ticketing option for easy access to your support
The consumers or the buyers can create tickets (ask their queries) and submit them to your support team through your default support email address. You can also create your business's support email address with a different email provider and forward emails from that address to your default Zoho Desk email. Learn how to do it.
Businesses can also receive their buyers' queries through social media channels, webforms, or chat buttons on their website. This helps ensure they have easy access to support teams.
Schedules to automate repetitive tasks
Schedules can be used to carry out custom functions created using Deluge script. When the schedules are created, automatic alerts, notifications, follow-ups, and reminders can be sent to stakeholders. For instance, agri-advisory companies use Schedules in Zoho Desk to automatically remind farmers about fertiliser application and pest control activities. Agri-tech companies use notifications to alert agents about post-sale support follow-ups with customers after a fixed period.
Automatic ticket status updates
Zoho Desk helps the users assign a particular status to an incoming ticket, and the agent can change the status based on any action they take. The default statuses are open, closed, on hold, and escalated, but they can also be customized within Zoho Desk. For instance, if an agent is internally evaluating the feasibility of procuring a particular type of fertilizer, he could set a custom status on the ticket as "internal verification" if one has already been created.
The status can also be auto-changed by using workflows and blueprints. If a customer wants tickets from a particular domain to be auto-closed, they can use a workflow rule.
Help center and knowledge base to empower your customers
Agribusinesses can use the help center to create a strong knowledge base to educate the farmers on the best practices of farming and also provide information to retailers and consumers that promotes their products. Additionally, the Community feature can facilitate conversations among vendors and buyers to exchange information about the best ways to customize Zoho Desk and provide outstanding support in their industry. The help center is also easy to customize to suit the needs of each company.
Zia Powered by ChatGPT for quicker resolution
Agents can use Zia powered by ChatGPT after the admin enables the setting in the setup under Zia > Generative AI > Services. They use this model to easily answer the queries of their customers and suppliers. The model generates responses using information available from open-source resources. For companies concerned about privacy, we alternatively offer Zia generative AI, which runs on Zoho servers, so all information is stored securely within Zoho’s infrastructure.
We have also released many AI features that could increase the productivity of your team and help you manage your resources. The Answer Bot can help your customers find answers on their own before reaching out to your support team. For more information, reach out to support@zohodesk.com
Happiness ratings for insight into your service
After resolving your customers' queries, you can add the happiness rating in the ticket template. The customers can choose if they are happy, neutral, or unhappy with your service by selecting the emoji displayed. There is also an option to remove the neutral button if you would like to categorize your customers only in two buckets. There are more customization options available in the platform.
Final thoughts
Using these features in Zoho Desk, businesses in the agriculture sector can streamline and automate their customer support process to increase the team's productivity. Additionally, tracking customer inquiries helps strengthen your knowledge base, and tickets can be converted into articles and used to train your Zia AI. All of these capabilities help quicken your company's resolution time and enable your customers to help themselves. It is time to enhance your customer experience. Reach us at support@zohodesk.com for more queries.
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