Why Real Human Support Matters for Your Farm
Running a Farm business is hard enough without technical headaches. Listen in as Support Specialist Will explains how Barn2Door’s real human support team helps Farmers resolve issues fast. From domain setups to payment processing, learn how expert help can keep your Farm Business running smoothly.
For more Farm resources, visit: barn2door.com/resources
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[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Independent Farmer Podcast, the go to podcast for do it yourself farmers who are taking control of their own business, skipping the middleman and selling direct to local consumers and wholesale buyers. This podcast is hosted by Barn2Door, the number one business tool for independent farmers to manage their business, promote their brand and sell online and in person.
Let's dive in to today's Independent Farmer Podcast.
Sarah Lentini: Welcome to the Independent Farmer Podcast. I'm Sarah, a sales lead at Barn2Door and your host for today's episode. As many of our listeners may be aware, Barn2Door is built for farmers who want to cut out the middleman and maximize outcomes for their business. We help farmers make more money, ditch the boring office work and look like a pro.
[00:01:00] In today's conversation, we will get into what the Barn2Door support team does day-to-day to support thousands of farmers and millions of buyers every day. Today I'm happy to welcome Will Guthormsen, a support specialist on our team based in Nashville, Tennessee. Will works with farmers and buyers across the country to resolve problems in real time, to help support a farm's operations and to help buyers answer questions and complete their purchases.
I'm happy to welcome Will to help provide insight on how the Barn2Door support team can manage the load of inquiries any given day. With more than a quarter billion dollars in farm sales and millions of transactions per year, the support team must be streamlined to make their efforts timely and efficient.
Welcome Will.
Will Guthormsen: Thanks for having me, Sarah.
Sarah Lentini: Thanks for being here. Before we get started, can you share with our listeners a little bit about your background and what compelled you to join Barn2Door?
Will Guthormsen: Yeah, of course. I always had a love for the outdoors and agriculture.
I was an Eagle Scout involved in FFA, so, so much of those two programs were, their focus was to help people and enjoy and [00:02:00] reap the benefits of outdoors and agriculture. So with that, I ended up being a high school educator and eventually wanted to have more involvement with agriculture and just helping people, especially farmers.
And I also had a knack for technology. So Barn2Door was a perfect fit, especially in the support role. So I'm super lucky to have been able to follow that path and be where I am today.
Sarah Lentini: Cool. That is awesome. What does a typical day look like for a support agent at Barn2Door? And then what is the primary focus of that role?
Will Guthormsen: every day is pretty different, to start in the morning. Um, farmers, they're early risers and so there's a lot of questions and inquiries and new support tickets that we get early in the morning. So that's the first thing that we tackle there as soon as we get in. And then as those inquiries are addressed, we reach out to them for more context or so.
We kind of shift our focus towards other processes and responsibilities that we have. This can range from domain delegation, access processes, that pretty much every farmer that has a website has [00:03:00] gone through. Sometimes it's a little more cut and dry. Sometimes there's some hoops we have to jump through.
Another step or thing that we have to do, is just explore the KYC process through our payment processor. This just essentially makes sure that every farmer that we have, has all of the business requirements that the IRS and our payment processor require all in our database essentially, and their database too.
but our primary focus every single day is to just make sure that everything runs as smoothly as possible and as expected, and to investigate any kind of error messages or unexpected behaviors that farmers or their customers can encounter throughout the day. and identify the root cause of those unexpected behaviors no matter what that may be. Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes it's not very obvious at all. So it's just every day is different. Some problems seem like they're the exact same on the surface, but it is not at all what it was the day before.
Sarah Lentini: Yeah, sure, I bet. And I know on the sales side of things, it's really important in our role when we're talking to our farmers to know their support.
So it's cool, it's [00:04:00] awesome. And early mornings is the best chance to catch them. So I'm sure they really do appreciate a morning check-in as well, so how does the customer support team collaborate with other internal teams, such as product or engineering to resolve complex farmer issues?
Will Guthormsen: We rely heavily on communication with the other teams. We really lean into our product team, our engineering and success teams. Every day we get feedback from farmers saying, Hey, it'd be really great if such and such could do this when I do this. We pass those along to our product team as feature requests, and then the product team then reviews those and they discuss amongst themselves how we can prioritize certain things. and then as our tickets come in, sometimes certain difficulties that people are encountering, uh, occur.
We don't always have the answer unfortunately. So we really rely and lean into our engineering team. They're able to decipher the long list of code that happens in the background under the hood that we can see, but they know what they're looking at, when it comes to that stuff.
And so we really rely on engineering to give it that extra deep dive in investigation, to [00:05:00] help resolve and identify what's causing certain things to go on. And then with our success team, I think we may talk to them the most out of all of our teams. They're just always quick little check-ins like, Hey, is this supposed to happen this way?
Or What are your thoughts on this? Things like that. it never ends and there's always something that's changing. And they just wanna stay on top of things like we do. But even though we communicate with all of these teams, it's also a two-way street. Engineering reaches out to us, product reaches out to us to help with testing sometimes, or maybe engineering notices something that happened in the background and they need us to do a quick investigation of it. Or they want us to do some outreach to a farmer, just to make sure that they're aware of what's going on. and then even success, we reach out to them to be like, Hey, we noticed this. Can you reach out to the farmer to let them know or give 'em a call, check in with them just to see how things are going.
Sarah Lentini: I would be terrified if engineering was reaching out to me. So that's, it's better you guys than me. That's awesome. I guess there's lots of different metrics, so what key metrics or performance indicators are used to measure success and effectiveness in [00:06:00] this role?
Will Guthormsen: Yeah, we have tons of different metrics that we use.
Primarily response time is one of the ones that we really try to focus on, especially with our chats. Our higher tier farms, they are able to utilize a chat functionality where you can talk directly with one of our support team members and we want the farmer to be heard. So many times you can go to any website, it's like, Hey, come chat with us and
you send a chat and you don't hear back ever. You may get an email three weeks later, but you've already self resolved your issue essentially. So that response time is something that we really, really pride ourselves in keeping as low as possible, and if we do, for whatever reason miss you on the first 20 seconds.
We're not ignoring you. Uh, it's our volume might be down on our laptop, to be honest. It's one of our biggest things that we pride ourselves in just to make the farmers feel heard. So that response time, super important. Another really key metric that we try to keep track of is resolution rate to these tickets, that we get, whether it be, A really intricate super niche thing that happened, that is really hard to [00:07:00] explain. We want to take our time and actually give you an answer and a solution. Even if that means that we have to flag every team that we've got, we're gonna do it that way you know, hey, that's what caused it or that's what's going on or that's how I can move on from this point. Another really important one to us is the customer satisfaction or csat, in the industry terms. That's just direct feedback from the farmers themselves. Without that we really would have to kind of figure out how we can improve on our own.
but sometimes it's easier to hear it directly from the source, like, Hey. I wish you would've answered it this way, or I really liked how you responded this way, or Thank you so much for your help. Even sometimes that alone helps me sleep at night. So I'm really grateful for the customer satisfaction metric, just because it reinforces what we do.
And helps us know that we're doing a good job. Everybody likes to be part of the back.
Sarah Lentini: Absolutely. And our farmers and ranchers are what make our world go around here at Barn2Door, so that open communication goes far for all of us. So that's cool. That leads into my next question, which [00:08:00] is: can you describe the resources and tools available to a support agent for diagnosing and troubleshooting farmer issues on the Barn2Door platform?
Will Guthormsen: So we use tons and tons of tools.
it'd be a very long podcast episode if I listed all of them. But our primary ones, that we use, They'll range from this thing called Datadog. I don't even know how you would compare it to the real world, but essentially every action click purchase, everything that happens on the Barn2Door platform is logged, just as a line item essentially.
And there are millions of these logs every day. Some are a little bit busier. Christmas day, probably not gonna be that busy or that many logs. But on a Monday morning in the spring, it's gonna be really, really busy. So that gives us more context to what exactly is going on under the hood.
Like I said earlier, our support team has a pretty good understanding of what these logs are telling us. However, not every time we have every bit of context or understanding as to why this log says what it does. but it is so helpful. Literally every single click [00:09:00] is a log, it's a data point that we're able to follow along exactly step by step of where someone's actions may have led to some other outcome that wasn't expected.
It's super, super helpful. Another thing that also has a lot of data logs is stripe. That's our payment processor. So whenever someone, a farmer comes in and they say, Hey, so-and-so's payment failed, or They got this weird error message when they were trying to check out. We are able to look it up almost immediately within Stripe and look at their data logs or just kind of the payments profile in general and be able to provide more context as to why we get these little reasoning bubbles, I guess a little message saying, Hey, this payment attempt failed because.
Whatever the reason may be. and it's helpful to pass that along back to the farmer because then they can let the buyer know like, Hey, it looks like you may need to add some more funds to the card, or you may need to try a different card 'cause that one's expired, or the zip code was off something. it's really, really helpful.
Stripe and then another tool that we use is mandrel. Mandrel is like a sub tool [00:10:00] of MailChimp, which is our email marketing provider. Essentially we always recommend using MailChimp. Mandrel is something that we have access to that allows us to see did emails get sent appropriately.
and these emails are for like purchase confirmation emails or, when a farmer requests a set of data, like there's past sales data from the last month. We're able to see, did that email actually get sent to them? And it gives us the time, the date, how many times they opened it, when they opened it.
It's super helpful just to gain context, to really whatever may be going on. And it is kind of helpful too, because we're able to see the content of that email sometimes. So if a farmer's like, Hey, I pulled this set of data, the information that I was hoping for didn't show. We go to look at that set of data that they requested and we can see, oh, the date range you had included isn't inclusive of the date that you're specifically looking at. So it gives us a lot more context. It's a great tool. and then my favorite tool is our staging store. So essentially we have these test stores.
It's really, really fun because we get to test out new features that are [00:11:00] in the works, and also just try to recreate some of the things that. These farmers have created themselves that may not be functioning the way that they thought that it would. So we can go and recreate exactly what they've made on our end and then put it through the ring how many times we can do something before it messes up, it just gives us a better hands-on sandbox environment that we can utilize and recreate the exact things that sellers and buyers are encountering too. Because just like the farmer, they can click the view store button in the top right when they do that.
We can also do that so we can go to our own fake store and purchase our fake items from our fake seller and have fake products but it gives us real feedback and real results when it comes to testing. So there's just a small taste of the litany of tools that we, on the support team have access to.
Sarah Lentini: Wow. I can see why a whole nother podcast episode would help with all that. It's a good toolbox. That's exciting to share and know about our support team. I mean, you guys have some cool stuff in there that goes a little bit over my head, but that's awesome. Now, this [00:12:00] question is one of my favorites.
What motivates you day to day?
Will Guthormsen: Yeah. Every day I really, it sounds very cliche of a support person to say this. I really like helping people, whether that be letting someone over in traffic or saying hey or holding the door. But, uh, it's really nice when you can go in every single day and get the opportunity to do that, especially with farmers, people that may sometimes be overlooked or underappreciated by society as a whole.
it's just nice to say Hey, I see you and I wanna help and I'm here to help. so. That's primarily my motivation. It helps me sleep at night very tightly and soundly. And, I know that our entire support team, they have the same motivation to really do that every single day as well.
Sarah Lentini: That's awesome. And then, kind of tying in with that one, can you share a farm success story that your proud support helped to resolve in a given issue?
Will Guthormsen: Yeah, absolutely. Relevant to the times it is the holiday season. And, a lot of farms don't realize that we allow for store credits to be utilized in lieu of a gift [00:13:00] card or a gift certificate.
We have store credits built right into the Barn2Door door platform. and we had a farmer the other day. She came in and she was very concerned like, Hey, I see that you have store credits. I think I set it. I don't know how to generate and keep up with a redemption code or redemption codes. 'cause multiple people are wanting to gift store codes to other people for Christmas and holidays.
and she was worried, really worried about having to keep up with all those different codes, and keep track of everyone's store credit usage and their balance, what they have and haven't used. And I just. Let her know like, Hey, here's a Learn Center article that tells you exactly how to set it up for your store.
and also you do not have to worry about keeping up with that. It's tallied right there next to their name under the customer's tab. they receive an automated email that sends them the redemption code. If they're not gifting it to someone, it just goes straight into their account. They don't have to do anything special.
She replied almost instantly and was like, oh my goodness, thank you so much. That's such a relief. And I checked back in a couple days later and she has sold like over a thousand dollars just in store credits, so pretty amazing.
Sarah Lentini: Yeah. What a [00:14:00] win! That is so cool. In many support organizations, AI chatbots and AI tools are increasingly prevalent.
Has Barn2Door implemented AI chatbots or do farmers talk to real people?
Will Guthormsen: Great question, especially given that AI is such a buzzword right now. Um, no, we don't use AI chatbots. We are as real as it gets when you message Barn2Door door support in the chat. It's me. The will that you're speaking to in that chat is Will, you're listening to right now.
I have been asked if I am AI and I say no. Sometimes people choose to not believe me, but that's okay. but the reason that we do this is because small farms are as human as it gets, and we want real humans to be there to help. And in so many circumstances, with AI chatbots, it's so easy to be misunderstood or there's a level of miscommunication, and a lack of human context.
kind of being able to understand the bigger picture as to why someone that maybe is wanting to do something, that AI chat bot just probably won't be able to pick up on. Maybe somewhere down the road, in the [00:15:00] future, the context that chat bots are able to get may be better, but right now it's not there.
Human touch is so valuable. and so no AI chat bots. It's us. We're real. We hear you.
Sarah Lentini: We love real people. Your voice is very smooth though, so I can see how people would, would get that, uh, mixed up there. So, what are the biggest challenges or common types of issues that support agents encounter, particularly when helping farmers with e-commerce and direct sales management?
Will Guthormsen: Some of the biggest, not even the biggest, but most common things that people have questions about, is just like, Hey, how do I do this at the store? Or how can I make this available only at a certain time? Or for a certain date. and how do I post this item? Thankfully we, on the support team, we created the Barn2Door Learn Center.
And so we have hundreds and hundreds of articles that give you the exact steps on how to complete all of these tasks. It's really, really in depth and super helpful. And you can just treat it like Google. It's super, super wonderful. You can just search in the word shipping. If you want to set up shipping items, then [00:16:00] all of the articles with the term shipping will show up in and you're able to just choose exactly which one works best for you.
more technical questions that we get a lot of times are around the DNS process with your farmer's domains. Here at Barn2Door, we make a website for you. And you may already have a domain for an older website that you wanna still use that's unique to your farm. And we gotta make sure that your domain points to the website that our team made for your farm.
And there's a whole process in between that. It can be really, really challenging at first because. Some of the farmers may not have ever interacted with the back end of a domain and all the settings and records and hosts and everything. So we are here to help with that and it's pretty fun ' cause it is like you can go from a blank website with your domain and it's not pointing to anything to.
Not only do now have a website that's live that people can visit, but you know how to do it too. You know how to actually manage these records or at least are familiar with that process. But some of the other issues that we have, particularly with the [00:17:00] support increasing themselves, is sometimes the lack of context to our inquiries that we get, for example.
We will often get a message or email or a chat saying, I have a customer that is trying to do this. And then that's the entire email. So something that really helps us help you as the farmer is, context. So whether that be the customer's email address, maybe their first and last name 'cause we can go find that email address usually from the customer's list on. Your Barn2Door account, or even a date, time, something, that really, really helps so much. That context goes such a long way. One last thing I'll touch on is the farmers' expected outcome of why they submitted this ticket.
It's not that we're nosy, sometimes it's really helpful. To understand, are you trying to post this item so this one person on your private list can get this one item within a 10 minute window, or are you trying to do it so everyone can order it? yeah. Context goes such a long way with us. and it's really, really wonderful when these farmers are able to provide as much context as possible.
Sarah Lentini: That's awesome. And I think it's even a bigger [00:18:00] perk to being in person and not talking to AI or robots is that context and that having that real person to have that context with helps it as well.
Okay. How does Barn2Door approach professional development and growth for support agents? And what opportunities are there to specialize or advance within the company?
Will Guthormsen: Like I said earlier, every day is different. It's not because I forgot everything the day before. It's because something new is happening and it's a new opportunity for me to learn. And it's such a pleasure as a former educator, I understand the value of learning and always being a sponge to your environment. And I get to do that every single day. It's really a blessing to be able to do that.
but I've been on the support team for two years now and. They've really let me run free and have a lot more freedom of exploring some of the ways that we navigate certain processes. How can we modify something to be a little bit more efficient?
that feedback is not just put on a shelf somewhere. It's heard. We have meetings every single day. We are always communicating with one another, and feedback is always there. To [00:19:00] be passed back and forth. It's really, really wonderful. We get the opportunity also to collaborate with not just the other support team members, but other teams, like we said, especially with engineering and product.
I think other than our success team support is sometimes the last people some of these farms ever speak with at Barn2Door especially our lower tiers. So we really like to be able to provide as much feedback to engineering and product. And they give us feedback too on how we can maybe give recommendations to the farmers and things like that.
And so it's just a great opportunity all around to really learn and see different business practices. Being a smaller company, it's not like there's a billion rooms in this office. We're sharing the same space, we're learning from one another, and it's a really wonderful opportunity.
Sarah Lentini: That's good. That's awesome. Well, beyond resolving technical issues, what is the responsibility of the support agent in terms of educating farmers and promoting best practices for using the Barn2Door platform?
Will Guthormsen: One of our main [00:20:00] responsibilities besidesn actually being support people is just always being open to questions.
For some farmers, this is a new platform, a new way of doing business for them. Farming has been around for tens of thousands of years and now it's becoming digitized almost. And you can be a successful farmer online. Those two things don't always seem like they would mesh well together, but they do.
and so some of these farmers do have a learning curve, whether it be just general technical abilities or marketing. MailChimp is such a cool tool, that maybe it was never even on someone's radar. People may have just done flyers in the past. Flyers are still a really valuable way to go about.
Promoting your farm, but so are online ads or an email marketing newsletter. And if someone buys something, you can enroll them into these newsletters and be top of mind for them. A lot of times when we get questions on best practices, especially for like, MailChimp or even just promo codes and things like that.
Support team, we know how that stuff works. But our success team is really great at [00:21:00] being able to provide more context, that human context, that even we as support agents may not be able to provide. So we really, really lean into our success team and being able to give us tips that we can pass along to farmers or just directly giving the farmers those tips, best practices on how to utilize Barn2Door to the absolute maximum.
You're paying for it, use it, it's there for you. There's so many features that sometimes farmers omit, they just don't think about or they may not see as valuable as they really are and so just being able to be there for people is so valuable. and just being open to questions. Not everybody knows.
We don't even know all the time, so we try to be just an ear that these farmers can speak into and ask questions. We also want to try to have a heart. Not everyone is used to technology or trust, automated processes, and I totally get that. And some people may have just a really, hard time building that trust.
And we're here to try to help them grow that trust in a program like Barn2Door. They're already here. Trust it. You had some sort of inkling during the early stages as like, oh, I could [00:22:00] see how this would work. And so we want to be that extra push from behind to like, keep going, keep trying. Don't give up.
You can be as successful as you want to be. The only person limiting you is you, we're here to help. Let us help. So
Sarah Lentini: That's awesome. I can tell you right now, I wish I had access to the Barn2Door support team in my personal life. So you guys do a lot and that's so cool. I have one last question. Are there any other tips or feedback you'd like to share with farmers who may be curious about other support resources at Barn2Door?
Will Guthormsen: Absolutely. Just open up your email, type in support@barn2door.com, and then ask us your question. We are happy to answer it truly, even if it is us redirecting you somewhere or giving you a link to a Learn Center article. We want people to be able to rely on those resources if we're not immediately available.
The Learn Center is there for you, always 24 hours a day. It's never closed or taking a nap. It's always open. We really, really recommend that farmers visit the Learn Center. It doesn't cost anything at another great resource that I think it is [00:23:00] utilized, but it could be utilized so much more, is office Hours.
Our success team office hour sessions twice every single day of the week. You don't have to be at a high level tier within Barn2Door. You can be at the lowest tier and still take advantage. Speak with someone face to face about whatever question you may have, whether that is the platform or, best practices with MailChimp.
Or even a question on, Hey, how do I edit my website? I want to add this little picture to it. How do I do that? There are so many resources that Barn2Door offers that are right there, and you just may not know so I highly, highly encourage people to just email us, ask message us, whatever it may take.
We're happy to help. We're always here to help. We got your back.
Sarah Lentini: Awesome. Well, thanks Will. I want to extend my thanks to Will for joining us on this week's podcast episode. You can check out more of Barn2Door on our Instagram @Barn2Door. Here at Barn2Door. We are humbled to support thousands of independent farmers across the country.
We are delighted to offer services and tools to help farmers access more customers, increase their [00:24:00] sales, and save time for their business.
If you are an independent farmer who is just getting started or transitioning to selling direct, please visit www.Barn2Door.com/learn-more. Thanks for tuning in today. We look forward to joining you next time on Independent.
Thank you for joining us on the Independent Farmer Podcast. At Barn2Door, we are passionate about empowering independent farmers to build a thriving business. To all the farmers out there, thank you for all you do to grow amazing food, care for the soil, and serve your local communities. You are the backbone of our country.
For free farm resources, or to listen to prior podcasts, go to barn2door. com backslash resources. We hope you join us again and subscribe to the Independent Farmer Podcast wherever you stream your podcasts. Until next [00:25:00] time.