Dairy Australia uses Salesforce to be more responsive to farmer needs.

Dairy Australia is the national services body for the Australian dairy industry and one of 15 Rural Research and Development Corporations (RDCs) that drive the nation’s agricultural innovation. The organisation’s main purpose is to support the profitability and sustainability of dairy farming and it does this by delivering practical tools and services to uplift farm productivity and by reducing barriers to trade.

Dairy Australia also acts as farmers' voice to the community, helping them to promote the benefits of dairy and build trust with consumers.

In 2020, Dairy Australia launched a five-year strategic plan detailing its priorities, including the drive to become a more innovative and responsive organisation. Salesforce is central to this priority and supports many others like inspiring technology and data-enabled dairy farms.

“Our strategy has been developed with the farmer front of mind and Salesforce is a key enabler. Salesforce enables how we engage with our farmers and increasingly how we build new digital tools to support them,” said Jay Mody, Strategy and Planning Manager for Dairy Australia.

Dairy Australia is funded by a combination of levies paid by dairy farmers and matching payments from the Commonwealth Government for eligible research and development (R&D) activities. This funding arrangement means farmers are Dairy Australia’s key customers; it’s critical for them to realise value from their levies and to have a positive customer experience.

Sales Cloud was brought into the organisation to support these aims. However, when Mody joined, he found it was used primarily to manage contacts. The data was also incomplete and failed to reflect the structure of the organisation and the different relationships it had with its customers.

“I knew Salesforce was capable of much more than what we were using it for, but we needed a strategic roadmap and vision for what we wanted to achieve,” said Mody.

Rob Czarka, CRM Product Owner at Dairy Australia, was appointed to deliver on this roadmap which has included expanding the use of Salesforce and integrating it into other systems such as Dairy Australia’s levy member register.

Through these initiatives and others, Dairy Australia has connected previously siloed data and created what Czarka refers to as a “corporate memory”.

“The main value we get from Salesforce comes from bringing together all these different tools and data so we can see every interaction we have with our customers in one place,” said Czarka. “We can then use that corporate memory to guide future interactions and strengthen customer relationships.”

One of Dairy Australia’s core functions is keeping farmers informed about policies and practices that could impact their operations. The majority of this communication has historically been done face-to-face with Dairy Australia running regular workshops in each of its regional locations. Dairy Australia also uses Pardot to digitally communicate with dairy farmers and other industry stakeholders and it has recently upgraded to Pardot Lightning.

This means that Dairy Australia can now quickly build and send beautiful, branded emails and this will become even easier with the use of the visual email template builder. Dairy Australia can now also easily see and report on who’s engaging with content. This engagement history is available to everyone internally who has a view of the organisation’s contacts and helps to facilitate more informed and productive conversations with farmers.

“One of the great things about Pardot is that it allows us to send mobile responsive emails, so whether farmers are out in the field or in the dairy shed, they can easily access the information we send out,” said Czarka.

Of course there will always be a time and place for face-to-face events and Dairy Australia has adopted Dashcord from the AppExchange to manage these inside Salesforce—right from the point of scheduling through to sending out post-event communications.

“It was only a few years ago that we were using pen and paper to write down the names of event attendees and manually feeding their names into a database,” said Mody. “Now the entire event management process is streamlined and we have more accurate visibility of who’s actually attended.”

With restrictions surrounding COVID-19, the organisation has only run a handful of events since implementation. However, it’s already found the process to be more efficient and anticipates savings of up to one hour per event, culminating to around 1,000 hours each year once regular frequency of events resumes. Additionally, Dairy Australia now has quick and complete access to attendee lists with information including dietary requirements. There’s also instant visibility into the roles of those attending which allows for the content of events to be tailored to audience needs.

Dairy Australia plans to further improve on the event experience by managing the feedback process in Salesforce as well. It is considering the use of Salesforce Surveys to achieve this and to gather wider customer feedback on its different services.

“Surveys are the only way we can actually understand whether we are delivering the right outcomes for customers and if they are satisfied with what we’re doing. There is no other way for us to measure success which is why this is an important part of our roadmap,” said Mody.

Over the past several years, Dairy Australia has introduced a number of online tools to help dairy farmers manage their operations. These have generally been developed by third-party vendors, leading to a number of solutions running on different technology platforms with different support models. In addition, some of these solutions were costly to maintain.

“Twelve months ago, we decided to take a step back and find a way to deliver these tools in a way that was more sustainable,” said Mody. 

Dairy Australia decided to build and host these tools using Experience Cloud which it deployed with support from Salesforce partner Trineo, recently acquired by Traction on Demand. Experience Cloud will ultimately provide farmers with a single point of access to all the solutions available to them and make it easier for Dairy Australia to track how they’re being used.

The organisation also anticipates significant savings in the time and cost to build, deploy, and manage new tools. For example, Dairy Australia will be able to leverage the same look and feel for each new tool and re-use base components like account creation and reporting processes. 

When it comes to maintenance, Dairy Australia will have the flexibility to make changes and updates to all tools at once—rather than having to work with multiple suppliers to update each app individually.

Total efficiency gains, accounting for time and cost, are expected to be as high as 70%. The estimate includes a 30% increase in efficiency for tool creation and a 30-40% increase in efficiency for tool maintenance.

The first two tools to have gone live on Experience Cloud are the Farm Business Snapshot and Farm Fitness Checklist. Both of these tools help farmers to understand their current business and how they can improve.

“Our long term vision is to provide each farmer with a personalised dashboard, powered by Salesforce, where they can access these tools as well as information tailored to their segment, location, and interests,” said Mody.

More immediately, Dairy Australia is working to improve its data model in Sales Cloud to gain a more complete view of its customers. For example, some customers might be associated with multiple farms as well as other organisations. Dairy Australia wants to have better visibility of those relationships as well as a consolidated view of contacts for every farm. 

“In the future, we want our employees to be able to drive up to a farm with everything they need to know about that farm available at their fingertips, including what relationships we have there, all of our recent interactions, and information on how the farm is performing,” said Mody. “Salesforce will enable all of that for us.”