How eAgronom Makes Customers Happier with Awesome Human Touch

eAgronom raised €500,000 from 50 of its own customers, and Stenver, then the company’s COO, puts the reason down to people: farmers who need help reach a human, not a bot. For a small support team, the story argues for using a shared knowledge base to make people faster, not a bot to replace them. eAgronom’s software was built to help farmers manage their farms and daily operations, and the company now also helps farmers verify sustainable practices and generate carbon credits.

Raising a round from customers takes more than good relationships. They pay for the service and put in extra money to own part of the company. Asked what sets eAgronom apart from its competitors, Stenver pointed to how the team takes care of customers with human touches instead of cold robotic replies.

The team has been doing great taking care of their customers with human touches instead of cold robotic replies

A human customer relationship team

When farmers at eAgronom have questions or need help, they can always reach a human representative from the customer relationship team and get their issue addressed. That makes customers feel their voices are valued, and more willing to stay with eAgronom or even invest in it. Most of them pick up the phone: in eAgronom’s own 2018 numbers, 77.9 percent of support conversations were calls and 22.1 percent were chats.

How the system assists the team instead of replacing it

How does eAgronom handle a growing customer base without a bot to reduce questions? Building an internal knowledge sharing process is the key. The customer relationship team has to help customers with whatever comes up, even when they lack full product knowledge, especially about new releases. For new questions they usually have to go to the product team for details, and that turnaround matters when a customer is waiting.

eAgronom keeps a centralized team knowledge base that every team member can access. Whenever a question comes up, everyone searches the knowledge base first, and usually finds the answer, before distracting someone else.

In general, a customer waits under 10 minutes for a reply from a human being. In eAgronom’s own 2018 numbers, the average response time in chat was 4 minutes 47 seconds, down from 18 minutes 30 seconds in 2017, and 95 percent of customers rated the service above satisfactory.

Challenges to keep information updated

As the product and the team grow, the biggest challenge for eAgronom is keeping the knowledge base up to date, so that new teammates do not get wrong or outdated information.

For now, eAgronom relies on managers to clean up the information regularly. It is the most effective way while most managers have been with the team for a long time and know the product and the company best. A process to maintain the knowledge base might come as the team keeps growing.

We recommend watching turnover, not the calendar, to decide when that process is due. Cleanup by long-tenured managers works only because they already know which answers are stale. A newer manager doing the same cleanup will not catch a wrong answer, because they will not think to check it. Once new managers join as often as veterans leave, assign an explicit owner and review date to each major topic instead of waiting for a support conversation to surface the error.

Instead of relying on robots to cut the number of questions its customer relationship team handles, eAgronom uses an easy-to-access team knowledge base to help the team answer more questions in less time. That keeps the team efficient without hurting customer experience. If you would like to join the team and help more farmers, check out their openings.