Farm Focus taps Data Cloud and Agentforce to support next-gen farmers

Built by farmers, for farmers, Farm Focus provides financial management applications and tools to help farmers manage their forecasting and planning. Farm Focus has proudly supported farmers since 1981 and has more than 10,000 customers across the sheep, beef and dairy industries.

Transform and simplify operations to better support farmers, now and in the future. 

Farm Focus has evolved significantly throughout the years. It aims to be the platform for future farming generations, recognising that up to 60% of current customers may retire from full-time farming in the next 15 years.

The company’s growth strategy is centred on helping farmers manage their businesses better and spend more time focused on what they love. It views AI as a tool to deliver on this outcome and improve the speed and efficiency of support. However, Farm Focus had to simplify its technology and operations to take full advantage of AI.

Farm Focus previously operated with over 40 tools and applications, hindering team collaboration and information sharing. The fragmented technology environment created bottlenecks and limited access to data needed to personalise customer engagement and support. The environment was also costly to maintain and update, requiring significant internal resources and dependence on partners.

Farm Focus replaces more than 40 tools with a single, unified Customer 360 platform.

In less than 12 months, Farm Focus has successfully replaced more than 40 different tools with a single, unified Customer 360 platform that powers farmer engagement and support. Through this consolidation, Farm Focus estimates it has saved more than $1.1 million NZD. More importantly, it can now activate its data to better support farmers. 

Data Cloud has been critical to Farm Focus’s transformation, connecting various data points such as product usage, customer service cases, email engagement, and invoicing. This provides sales and service teams with an immediate, single view of the customer. It offers valuable insights into their subscriptions, cases, email engagement, and potential areas of opportunity or needed support. 

With Service Cloud, Farm Focus has also consolidated the number of systems used by its customer service team. So the team can manage chats and phone calls in one unified workspace rather than switch between screens. 

Farm Focus supports farmers around the clock using Agentforce.

Farm Focus is proud to support farmers and seeks to deliver exceptional service. However, farmers work long hours, and their questions can come in overnight or early in the morning, previously yielding a backlog of cases at the start of each day. 

Now with Agentforce, Farm Focus can answer farmers’ questions around the clock. Farmers can chat with the company’s agent, Daisy, who provides instant answers using knowledge articles and product information in Data Cloud. 

With as many as 12,000 questions received through chat alone each year, this represents a massive opportunity to increase efficiency while delivering a better experience for farmers. Additionally, if farmers require additional support or prefer to speak with a human, Daisy can escalate enquiries to one of its farming experts. 

“We’ve always taken the lead when it comes to disruption in our industry, and we are continuing to do that now with agentic AI. Our approach is considered, and our use cases are informed by thinking deeply about how AI can help the business and, more importantly, our farmers,” said Blair Rooney, Head of Growth Marketing, Farm Focus.

Farm Focus personalises engagement with agentic marketing. 

Marketing Cloud has transformed customer engagement by providing Farm Focus with AI agents and actionable data, making it easy to build and personalise campaigns.

The marketing team previously relied on separate tools and spreadsheets for segmentation and campaign management. Now, they can segment audiences and build, send, and measure campaigns entirely within Salesforce. This has reduced the time it takes to prepare marketing emails from a week to a few hours, freeing the team to focus on refining content and creating campaigns for more granular segments. 

With Marketing Cloud connected to live data, the marketing team can be more responsive to changes in farmers' details or product use and personalise their experience in real time. 

Humans and agents to work together in Slack, accelerating productivity and service. 

Slack is Farm Focus’s work operating system, bringing together the apps and workflows used daily to support the company’s 10,000 customers. Farm Focus’s deployment of Salesforce has elevated its use of Slack by enabling it to search for and collaborate around CRM data in Slack. 

Farm Focus will soon switch on Agentforce in Slack, enabling AI agents to suggest and take action right in the flow of work. For example, Farm Focus plans to use Slack agents to help launch, manage and deploy campaigns via Marketing Cloud and to query CRM data right from Slack.

Farm Focus partnered with NMD to implement Salesforce. The consulting partner helped guide Farm Focus through unwinding the complexity of its technology and operations. This included managing change and adoption, as well as upskilling on Salesforce.

Rooney has since earned his own Salesforce certification and established a team of Salesforce champions who can support their departments with any new use cases or requests. This is a vast improvement from the past, where the company relied heavily on partners for system changes and enhancements.

Salesforce has replaced a complex, fragmented technology environment with a single Customer 360 platform that provides Farm Focus a foundation for future growth. Data Cloud has played a key role in this transformation by unifying and harmonising disparate data points into a single, real-time customer view that informs every interaction. With Agentforce, Farm Focus can unleash the full potential of this data to automate workflows and enable customers to self-serve.