Improving Sales and Service with Digital, Accessible Customer Information

While providing ag services to your customers, your sales and office staff field a lot of questions. What product, blend, or amount did I order last year? How was my prepayment applied? How much do I have remaining on that purchase contract? Help your staff be prepared with the answers and possibly uncover new opportunities for additional sales in the process. Backing your business with digital, accessible customer information provides the opportunity to deliver excellent customer service.

Lori Potter, Sales Account Manager for SSI, says using Agvance SKY can “make your day easier for sure, serve your customers better, and ultimately improve your sales.” Easily accessible from anywhere your staff may be doing business with customers, Agvance SKY is accessed through web or native applications on a laptop, computer, or mobile device. Included applications are customized based on each business’ needs. Just a few of the core components of Agvance SKY for all businesses include the applications Analytics, Customer, and Order. Together they help your staff answer customer questions and bring focus to additional sales opportunities.

Agvance SKY Tools for Improved Service and Sales

Analytics

“Analytics is our dashboard reporting tool that allows you to interact with your data in more interesting ways than what a tabular report allows,” says Potter. Over 80 standard dashboards provide a unique view into your business, customer trends, and opportunities for additional sales. Dashboards can be favorited and then quickly available from the overview screen. Potter suggests sales managers utilize the Gap Analysis Dashboard which “helps you identify sales opportunities by looking at your customers and where they do business with you, but then also seeing where they don't do business with you too, and potentially identify those different opportunities.”

Other Agvance SKY Analytics dashboards recommended by Potter for sales staff include the Sales Dashboard to reveal top customers, products, and more based on filter criteria, as well as the Booking and Sales Invoices dashboard which combines information for bookings and invoices in one interactive dashboard. Visual graphs, interactive tools, filtering, sorting, and exporting are common tools throughout the SKY Analytics dashboards to help improve sales and customer service.

Customer

Customer provides a 360-degree view of a customers’ account. It “looks across all of Agvance and pulls customer information together for you in one easy tool,” explains Potter. When assisting a customer, sales or office staff can start typing the customer’s name and quickly access a customer account overview and drill down to more details. Available information includes payments due, credit status, a customer map, balances, and an activity tab of the five most recent customer activities. Attachments or statements can be viewed or downloaded as PDFs. Staff can find out if a blend ticket has been invoiced, loaded, or unloaded all from within Customer.

Additional helpful details to view in Customer include grain balances by commodity or location, customer relationships, destinations, field data, ship to locations, tillage practices, weather by field, and energy tank data. From the Payments screen, prepay on bookings, unapplied cash payments, or selected invoice payments can be completed. Answers to just about any customer question are found in Customer.

Order

“Order provides options for you to get orders in the program from your mobile device without being in the office or making a phone call to the office,” says Potter. Order is conveniently accessible from within Customer or as a separate application. “Whether it be a delivery ticket, a field plan, a blend ticket, a booking, it follows the same intuitive process for creation,” says Chris Morrison, Sales Account Manager. Prompts for information make sure all necessary data is collected and available to answer customer questions or anticipate sales opportunities.

Read the 5 Advantages of Adding SKY and request more information by completing the form below.

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