Kendra Meisgeier, a precision ag specialist with River Valley Cooperative, talks about the first two years of the co-op’s grower portal, how it ties back to precision agriculture, and what the future of customer service looks like.
Tell us about your role.
As a precision ag specialist, I work with our customers and member owners to promote grid sampling, create and support variable rate fertilizer and planting prescriptions, but lately a lot of my time has been focusing on implementing our customer portal with our sales team and also our customers. We’ve partnered with AgVend, and I work closely with internally with my rally team and with the AgVend team to make a smooth transition for both our sales team and our customers.
What’s changed the most in your role?
I have been with River Valley for five years. I actually started as a sales agronomist. So I was on the selling side and worked closely with the precision ag specialist. Then here about two years ago I transitioned to a precision ag specialist. So there’s been a lot of change just from the different products that we’re promoting and how all of that works.
Tell us about your grower portal.
We signed with AgVend in June 2020, and then went live with customers in September 2020. We’re in our second growing season now.
A early successes we had, we had a lot of our customers join right away. So we had good traction that way, and they started in 2020, so it was a natural fit for just how everything was going that year.
Some of the greatest lessons we’ve learned is just how farmers react to a digital platform. Traditionally, I think that we thought we weren’t sure how the traction would take, but we were really surprised with just how many farmers have signed on and are active with our portal. They are communicating with our internal team, and signing fertilizer contracts and grain contracts. Now we have grain offers live so farmers at any time of the day or night can place grain offers.
What’s the goal of having a grower portal?
The main focus behind it is to increase our level of customer service. Farmers like to do business different ways. Some like a digital-facing customer service and others still want paper copies of their grain contracts. So, really it’s being able to serve all of our customers the way they want to be served.
Listen to the full episode here to learn more about:
- What tech tool she’s encouraging farmers to look at
- The greatest challenges for the 2022 growing season
- How they’ve communicated with growers about the current supply chain concerns
