Benchmarking Report
The benchmarking workgroup kicked off in July 2018 with the goal of improving FCSAmerica’s current benchmarking offering and providing customers a meaningful snapshot of their operation’s strengths and areas for improvement. The original benchmarking report was 14 pages long, contained outdated 3D bar charts that were difficult to read, and did not provide valuable financial information to farmers and ranchers that would allow them to improve their operation. Financial Officers that work with customers were stuck explaining the information in the document, instead of having conversations that would allow them to act as trusted advisors.
Project Goals
Customers want to provide for their families by building wealth; FCSAmerica wants to help facilitate that success. One way to do that is to provide information about where their operation stands in relationship to their peers to offer a unique perspective to their decision making. The work group identified that there are borrowers who simply need reassurance that they are making sound decisions; we wanted a tool that could help further these goals.
In the Details
We conducted a sketching session to come up with different visualization iterations. The results were inspired by Health Apps that quickly summarize a few key metrics into an easy to comprehend format.
This team identified financial metrics we thought borrowers would be interested in. What made our process unique from other organizational attempts at benchmarking are the multiple customer feedback sessions used to confirm or refute the assumptions. I gathered quick customer and non-customer feedback at Husker Harvest Days in September by briefly interviewing 15 people. Then, I conducted three long-format interviews at customer homes in rural Iowa and Nebraska. The feedback was positive on the prototype, the financial metrics chosen, and how easy the product is to understand.
Benchmarking Prototype - Page 1
Benchmarking Prototype - Page 2
Customer Quotes
Bianca: How easy or difficult would you say reading this report is? Do you feel like…?
P001: No, now that I've spent 10 minutes looking at it, easy. It's that simple. Okay. If you have a grower that can't be taught to read that, then he probably shouldn't be managing assets.
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P002: This kind of looks like going to parent-teacher conferences and you see, like, these kids are doing a lot of maps testing and stuff like that. That's what they do at Centennial, where they score you in, you know, math, reading, English, science, social studies.
Bianca:Sure.
P002: So you read this, you know, or you look at the charts or whatever, like you're doing better than 72 percent of your peers or whatever, you know, you see where you are, your peers are, you see where the state standard is, the district, and your kid or whatever. So it's similar to that.
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P003: It's like taking your kid to the doctor, getting the.... he's in the 85th growth percentile.
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Bianca: So, I am going to show you an idea for a report that we've been working on. It is double sided so it's front and back, but I'm going to... I'm gonna hand this to you. It doesn't have your information on it. This is for your…
P001: That's like your credit score.
Bianca: So, tell me about the score that's in this like grayish box that's up here. Tell me about what, what you would interpret that to mean.
P001: It means I've got 37 people that are doing a better job than me and I'm ahead of the other 63. So, uh, when you're, what's that old saying? When you're in the woods, and there's a bear after you, you don't have to be the fastest.
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P002: And this is just kinda like a, like your credit score then, right?
Bianca: Is that how you…
P002: That's what I say it would be
Outcomes
The workgroup was unsure how customers would react to the idea of using a score to quickly communicate summarized financial health because it is a different approach than we have historically taken. However, customers immediately, without prompting were able to identify the intent. It was helpful for those individuals who were not particularly interested in the details to have one metric to reference.
We are looking forward to providing this information to borrowers as a tool to help financial officers facilitate meaningful conversations. Grain customers are the initial pilot group for benchmarking and will be offered to other operation types in the future. This product will continue to be refined with more customer feedback. z