This blog discusses how consumer complaint works in the Agricultural Industry. It provides an example to show how the agricultural industry is different from other industries in dealing with consumer complaints. Read on to find out more about this!

Each industry comes with its own consumer complaint process with great degrees of variability. Knowing the intricacies through a complex nexus of niche knowledge and information, work processing, ground or fieldwork is highly important for people who sit at helpdesks and resolve the issues that the target consumer masses are teeming with. Since agriculture is the biggest contributor to the gross domestic product of the nation, employing over half of India’s population (58%), it has consumers in almost every part of the nation, and owing to different demographic traits of different places, there are queries ranging from, important but fundamental questions about pesticides, seed, fertilizer, and fuel to more specific ones, likes market management,  processing, and strategies to excel in the model and real-time agribusiness system.

How is Consumer Complaint Dealt with in the Agriculture Industry?

The Agricultural business sub-sector has several main markets that it has erected prolific industries like the agricultural input suppliers- who are essentially the seed, soil, fertilisers, manure and other important resources to initiate the farming process. The next market is that of the farmers, growers, and producers, who till and plough their fields and look after the crops, providing them care, irrigation, aeration, adding supplements to fertilise the soil and including other important processes and seeing them through to harvest. The farmers collect the produce too. The third industry market that is doled out owing to agricultural succession demand is the processors, distributors and wholesalers. After the farmers have collected the produce, they need to find a suitable processing industry, or hand over their crops, harvest and produce to someone who processes the crops to selling form and sells them ahead to smaller outlets, or one big outlet like a crops/ vegetables/ fruits/ general harvest wholesaler. Wholesalers usually have large markets of a single type of product, and retailers who form the last market in the chain have smaller outlets with a collection of different kinds of produce from whom normal people purchase vegetables from. 

Customer complaints may be a great resource to build on, as well as a great way to make the target audience and masses believe that the company trusts and believes immensely in the mental and emotional integrity of the consumers, and their anticipated feedbacks aren’t a fallacy but duly regarded and pivotal for growth and bettering resources and strategies. Sectors related to agriculture include food and beverage manufacturing; food and beverage stores, tanning industries for textiles, apparel, and leather products; and forestry (for essential oils, wood, rubber, resin, sandal, etc) and fishing (pisciculture). 

It is very vital to respond to customer feedback, incorporate them in advertisements or promotions, and never to leave a potential customer hanging, because that again sends a fallible image of the company out in the public, often miscomprehended as a dearth of human resources in the company. To maintain an overall positive sentiment towards the company, it must necessitate and propel customer support and success, hugely. India produces the largest quantities of rice, wheat, cotton, sugar, horticulture, and dairy by volume and has many countries in the world hence, that is quite dependent on it. This employs hundreds of thousands of people. Therefore, the loss of a customer, and the negative image it sends through to hundreds taking in that information, can be genuinely debilitating for the company.

What is the process of Addressing Customer Questions?

Like any other industry, the failure to satisfy consumers, selling products of substandard quality, or overstating or exaggerating the merits of something to the buyer’s market, might cause an increase in sales for a short while till it falls flat because the oversold qualities of the concerning products fail to show up, leave the consumers unimpressed. The launch and failure of products can be easily tracked by keeping an eye out for the reviews and general acceptance by the public of a product manufactured.

The customer care representatives must be acquainted with various topics- even the things that people without special niche knowledge are not familiar with. There is a fair chance that newly recruited support team representatives of a company may lose a golden handshake deal due to job duty fails such as unsatisfactory query resolution or inadequate information supplied and misdirection, which results usually from inadequate knowledge in the field. The employees must be guided through updated query solutions, explained, and enriched with knowledge so that they can provide effective solutions, tangible and productive that will satiate the demands of the customers.

Know more: Consumer Court Online Complaint

A few things to remember when a customer care representative who is new to the field, as well as the job, are as follows:

• Remembering and documentation of queries are very important; the questions posed by the consumer or farmer/ grower/ producer are important to them and hence were posed to the representative. It should not be devalued as it tests a very integral and important characteristic feature of the customer care and support team of the company market.
• Each question acts as a reservoir with umpteen chances of improvement and hence shouldn’t be discounted using novice self-discretion.
• Answering customer questions about manure, synthetic pesticides, seeds, fertilizers, Fuel and Oil 40
• Instead of getting irked with the number of questions being posed or the delivery of the questions, the employee should train his mind to look at the problem and not the consumer complaining about it, and view such complaints as Market Intelligence- or the high intelligence and integrity of the consumers.
• Interrupting consumers is rude, conveys defensiveness, and reduces trustworthiness. Allow customers to fully express their thoughts without interruption. Waiting isn’t just polite; it also gives you more time to think about the question and your response to the question at hand. Seasoned professionals will also tell you that the first question a customer asks may not be the actual question the customer wants you to answer. Letting customers finish gives your customers time to collect their thoughts, too.
• Making the most of the questions and queries the representative is posed with and providing immediate solutions, even if they are temporary, they should be of some immediate assistance to a person or consumer legal notice for defective goods who is entirely banking on them for help.

The very fact that an employee should be well-versed with what they’re dealing with and stay acquainted with the latest developments made in all related and associated sectors, be it scientific, technological or fundamental levels. The company should also have a provision of frequently answered questions because the solutions to these queries are effectively relayed from farmers to processors to wholesalers to retailers and finally customers. The employee should be well equipped with knowledge so that he is at least able to answer the most fundamental, important, basic questions about pesticides, seed, fertilizer, and fuel that farmers and the long link of market entities thereafter, may find the need to ask.

Conclusion

People in the agricultural sector as well as in the related fields are huge in number, and they depend directly upon query and complaint filing to seek assistance from a well-informed person or team. The strategies that turn complaints into opportunities for the industry of providing better services, so one must view the grievances as a very wide scope of improvement for the company and be of more use to the people and purpose it is serving. Also, with Vakilsearch, you can get more information about insurance consumer complaints. If you need to file one, our experts can help.