FCSAmerica: Balancing Customer Value With Business Needs

Carl Horne is the VP of Digital Products & Services at Farm Credit Services of America (FCSAmerica). When farmers, ranchers, or other agri-businesses need credit or other financial services, they go to FCSAmerica. And this is a big decision, because agriculture requires a lot of capital (most loans range from several hundred thousand to several million dollars).

Carl’s team had the goal of engaging with customers digitally. This was a broad goal that could be interpreted in many different ways, but they chose to focus on the website experience. FCSAmerica had traditionally provided a high-touch personal experience, so business leaders wondered if they could make some of their resources self-service. But this led to a potential problem. Customers regularly shared that they liked talking to their financial officer, and they considered this to be a trusted relationship. Would customers be willing to give up that trusted relationship for the convenience of a digital experience?

Through the course of customer interviews, Carl’s team learned that many of their customers were already researching online to figure out how much property they could afford. This led Carl’s team to identify “What can I afford?” as an opportunity that they might be able to address digitally.

They experimented to figure out how to address this opportunity with an online calculator. The idea was that a potential customer could enter the relevant information and the calculator would provide the answer, similar to an online mortgage calculator. In this scenario, the calculator would be a self-serve option for customers.

But since they’d heard from customers that human interaction was important, Carl’s team was concerned that an online calculator might not be sufficient. Would customers trust the results? Or would they still seek advice from their financial officer? They experimented with offering a chat feature alongside the calculator so a person would be online during business hours to answer customers’ questions live. These experiments demonstrated clearly that customers did not want to talk to a person at this stage of the application process. No matter what they did to change the wording or the images, customers would consistently close out of the browser to avoid interacting via chat.

Through these experiments, Carl’s team came to two critical conclusions: The human touch wasn’t needed during the calculation stage—it was more important later in the process—and the opportunity of “What can I afford?” was something Carl’s team could solve digitally.

They iteratively built the online calculator, and, today, that product has grown into their successful FarmLend program, a service that enables farmers and ranchers to apply online—rather than through their branches—for financing. Carl’s team was able to identify an existing need where their customers were already comfortable engaging online and used that as a starting point to teach their customers how to engage digitally. Their FarmLend customers still engage with and benefit from a trusted relationship with their financial officer, but they do much more of the loan process digitally through the FarmLend website.