By Teresa Carlson, Vice President, Microsoft Federal
Financial regulations are a lot like technology standards. Both seek to put rules in place that even the playing field and eliminate waste and abuse. Both make use of independent, third party organizations focused on protecting consumers or organizations. And both seek to increase transparency and accountability without hurting innovation. The financial legislation that President Obama signed earlier this year dealt with lending best practices, and that’s a topic that affects many of the organizations we work with in the federal community, including small businesses and farmers.
The Farm Credit System was created by Congress in 1916 to provide farmers and ranchers with reliable access to financing. AgFirst Farm Credit Bank is one of the organizations that serves the U.S. agriculture community through this system, offering funding and back-office support applications to lenders that assist over 80,000 farmers across the country. To help improve the services AgFirst’s customers are able to offer to the folks that grow the food we eat every day, they’ve deployed a really cool hosted Dynamics CRM solution.
When you think of CRM technology, you don’t immediately think of the agriculture community, but it’s driving incredible efficiencies for lenders. In the past, individual farm data often resided in IT silos, in physical file folders, or in account managers’ brains. During staff turnover a lot of that customer information would be lost or difficult to locate, and service would suffer. Lending to the agricultural community requires a close partnership based on the evolving needs of a particular farm. CRM solutions are an efficient way to bring all necessary account data into a centralized location, which maintains that organizational knowledge. In the case of AgFirst, staff now have access to data from across the entire client list, and that frees account experts to get out into the field and meet with the farmers they serve. And because the solution is hosted, lenders access apps on a pay-as-you-go basis, saving on infrastructure costs that come with building and operating an on-premise IT system.
Our partner Customer Effective built the AgFirst CRM solution, and it’s a great example of how technology can save federal organizations money during tough economic times. Other government agencies like the Small Business Administration (SBA) have used similar solutions to provide resources to citizens and constituents in more efficient ways.
For more background on the AgFirst project, check out this video on the tangible benefits the organization has achieved!