Delphos Coop

Customer Stories

About

Delphos Coop is a leading agribusiness located in south central Kansas, specializing in grain origination and ag retail. As a member-owned cooperative, the company is committed to supporting and empowering farmers in their community to help them succeed in their farming operations. With a dedicated team of knowledgeable employees and a strong commitment to customer service, Delphos Coop helps farmers achieve their agricultural goals by providing them with agronomic solutions and products to maximize crop yield, improve farm efficiency, manage risk, enhance sustainability, and ensure product quality and safety. Brett Courson has been the general manager since June 2020.

The Opportunity

One of the key goals of the cooperative is to help its members buy and sell their grain at a fair price. Each month, Courson meets with branch managers to talk about how they can improve and provide better access to markets. One improvement they identified was to help farmers find market information more easily – cash bids, futures markets, news resources, and other items needed to stay up-to-date.

Additionally, phone calls from farmers asking about prices were taking a lot of their staff’s time, negatively impacting their ability to get their other high-priority work done throughout the day.

Courson knew that technology could help. When he took on the general manager role, one of his first initiatives was updating technology around the cooperative. “You have to adapt to the market and stay ahead. It’s changing constantly. Once you get behind, it’s so expensive to catch up,” he said.

Delphos Coop Logo

The Solution

To address these challenges, Delphos Coop implemented Bushel’s customer portal to provide farmers with access to the information they need on a daily basis. According to Courson, the platform also enabled the company to send timely updates and offers to farmers, improving communication and engagement. “The platform has all the most important things in their day-to-day lives: checking prices, signing contracts, paying invoices, etc. It has everything they need for the day in one package,” he said.

Delphos Coop doesn’t rely just on the farmers checking out the customer portal: it also takes advantage of in-app notifications to notify farmers of market reports or significant changes in futures or cash bid prices. “Bushel has been a game-changer for us. It has allowed us to provide real-time pricing information to farmers through automated messages, eliminating the need for them to call and inquire about prices.”

“Bushel has been a game-changer for us. It [the customer portal] has allowed us to provide real-time pricing information to farmers through automated messages, eliminating the need for them to call and inquire about prices.”

Brett Courson, General Manager

The Results

Forty fewer phone calls per day is what Delphos Coop has seen since implementing Bushel’s customer portal. But this doesn’t mean conversations stopped happening. Rather, Bushel’s tools allow grain merchandisers to be proactive and informed, calling farmers and having more intentional conversations about market timing and grain sales. “This has been one of the biggest moves to help our customers,” Courson said.

Approximately 36% of Delphos Coop’s farmers are using their customer portal – higher than the industry average of 25% adoption. Courson said even the most tech-averse farmers who were hesitant about using the portal now remark how easy it is. Bushel provided Delphos Coop with marketing materials that they, in turn, shared at their locations to give farmers easy step-by-step instructions about how to log in and access their information.

They also recently launched Bushel’s digital payments solution, which streamlined their payment process to farmers and eliminated the need to mail paper checks, which sometimes took up to 15 days to arrive.

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