Case Study: Agriculture

Inventory automation enables $11M in savings for agriculture giant

Automation and sales support enables field sales team to enhance the customer experience and improve the bottom line

Overview

The client is an agriculture giant who chose HGS’s scalable contact center support to help contain costs and provide sales support functions that allows their field sales team to more efficiently engage key customers. HGS’s inventory automation, process efficiencies, and claims support led to $11M in savings, 30 sales hours saved per week, and 50% reduction in order processing time.

$11Min cost savings through outsourcing

50%reduction in order processing time

30 hoursper week saved for sales team

Client background

The client is a rapidly growing, sustainable agriculture company.

Business challenge

The client was looking for scalable contact center support that would help them contain costs and support their field sales team in better utilizing their time, allowing them to focus on their core business. A few specific business goals included:

Increasing efficiencies in inventory and order management
Enhancing customer experiences in claims processing
Optimizing time utilization of field sales teams through training, tech and sales support

The solution

The client looked to HGS for innovative solutions and technical support to resolve both inventory and process inefficiencies that drove significant waste and redundancy for the organization and dealers alike.

Technical and sales support

HGS created and published standardized and ad hoc reports to field sales teams, with real-time sales reporting and budgeting numbers for cross-selling and upselling opportunities.

The client was provided with 360° technical support by way of IT, product, system user support, troubleshooting, issue resolution services, and support for various applications. This helped bring about consistency in the technology used by the client and their partners by promoting eSolution applications to over 15,500 dealers and growers, making communications more efficient in inventory and order management.

Inventory automation

HGS designed and developed an inventory automation solution focused on the development of a long/short database. Employing real-time product visibility, this database identifies dealers long on seed and puts these dealers in touch with dealers who are short on seed. By automating inventory management, this increased the efficiency of the entire process. This tool is a critical technical competency for the client—one that continues to deliver savings and strategic market advantage.

Order efficiency

The sales specialists coordinated global delivery, thereby ensuring that the sales promises were kept, taking ownership of the entire order process from customer request to delivery. Efficient logistics handling and order management helped reduce the average time taken to process orders and decreased the average number of holds. HGS also handled inventory management, trade, and compliance for this client.

Claims processing

An important part of enhancing the customer experience was in claims management—taking over the task of forms filed by farmers for seed compensation of lost crops. Efficiency of the claims process was increased through developing and documenting the claims program, and conducting quality assurance testing for the customer’s proprietary claims model.

Employee training

Consistency in employee performance could be facilitated by translating client ideas into documented processes. A SWOT analysis on internal and external documents helped identify opportunities for improvement. Client-provided process documents were reviewed to ensure accuracy and efficiency, and then communicated to the teams in innovative ways such as creating instructor-led, self-study documents.

Results

HGS’s scalable contact center support helped the client in their sales transformation by effectively containing costs and saving sales teams’ time. Here are a few wins: