An Australian Agri Tech Firm Increased Customer Service Turnaround Speed By 586%

The collective imagery around agriculture and farming includes a farmer, a piece of land, and grain. Well, there is a lot more to it. For example, farmers need to turn to grain marketing, logistics and contract management, once a crop is harvested. Digitised grain record-keeping enables farmers to not only safeguard their income but achieve business goals. AgriDigital, an Australia-based grain supply-chain innovator, helps farmers, bulk handlers, and traders manage their grain and related workflows. And to be able to do this, robust internal workflows of their own are key! Just to put things in perspective, AgriDigital is a fast-growing digital platform that has garnered $7bn worth of transactions already and has over 9.5K users. 

We spoke to Shilpa Gupta, Infrastructure Engineer, at AgriDigital, to know how Appsmith enabled the different departments in AgriDigital with internal tooling solutions. 

Conserving Engineering Bandwidth

AgriDigital needed a software solution to support its customer support and success teams. Often, customers would ask for a function that wasn’t available on the main platform. This meant that an engineering ticket would be raised for the backend team, joining a long list of tickets. These tickets would be looked into when the engineering team got the time or based on the ticket’s urgency.  “There was a huge gap here. Customer requests would be for smaller things that could be self-served by a customer success team. However, the long route involving dependencies on the core backend engineering team was a time sink,” says Shilpa, and adds that spending engineering resources on work that can be done by support staff was impacting efficiency on both teams. 

Empowered Teams Create Powerful Products‍

Shilpa explains a specific case at AgriDigital in her own words: 

“In our AgriDigital production app, we have something called connections. One of the common requests from customers would be to delete the connection. To do this, the customer would send an email to support requesting deletion. It’s a one-click job that can be serviced by the support team and should take less than a minute to do. However, we did not have an internal tool to enable the customer support team. Instead, the support team would create a ticket on Jira, add in the details. This ticket would then get assigned to an engineer. The engineer would need more information depending on the details listed or omitted in the Jira card. The task would then be done, and time would also be spent testing and confirming whether the task is done. There are so many steps here that can just be avoided.” 

Here are a few screenshots of how Shilpa’s apps and dashboard: 

With Appsmith, Shilpa built an internal tool to enable the customer support team to care for smaller and frequent requests, cutting down on unnecessary steps and providing quick resolutions for the end-users. 

Why Shilpa Loved Using Appsmith for AgriDigital?‍

We asked Shilpa about a few things she loved about using Appsmith. She mentioned that Appsmith’s speed of shipping was superb. “Our schema is not public. And there was a point when Appsmith did not support it. But it was in the pipeline and was implemented in a few weeks, putting all our worries to rest. Even now, there’s a new feature with which we can generate a new feature that was super helpful for us because we didn’t have to create anything from scratch!” she says. 

Shilpa has also written a detailed blog about using Appsmith to increase efficiency and enable her organization. We have picked up a few excerpts from her blog to share here: 

Intuitive

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It’s so easy for anyone to set up in the first place. It simply went directly to the AWS marketplace, selected their pre-existing supported AMI, and spun up an EC2. Instantly it was up and running. After tweaking some basic infrastructure configuration, I obtained a secure SSL certificate and domain, set it up using our existing security groups, and within 30 minutes everything was up and running.

Drag and Drop 

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Creating applications is so simple. They have pre-built widgets that can be placed on a page with simple drag and drop actions. Connecting to sources is super simple. You can even create a pre-made “form” simply by selecting a source and using their wizard to automatically auto-generate the CRUD operations. It’s pretty impressive!

Rapid Prototyping

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We can utilize internal tools to undertake lightning-fast prototyping across the business to test out ideas. We are already seeing this with our Finance and Inventory Tribes testing our internal tools to build prototypes for process improvements.

Great Documentation and Support

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Appsmith’s documentation is fantastic. Their support is timely and responsive. They have tutorial videos to help guide us through the entire process.

Investing in internal tools is an excellent step for organizations to prepare themselves for growth. Shilpa has found that developing the internal self-service tool for her organization has vastly improved the experience of their customer support team. What took them two days to do now takes them five minutes. This has improved their customer service turnaround speed by 586%! This has a multiplier effect over a year. 

Empowered employees are empowered with the right tools. Internal tools can help empower businesses and enable employees to resolve everyday problems independently. This reduces the overall pressure on the engineering team, which can focus on developing customer-facing technology for better business outcomes.

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