Seasonality in Health, Risk CTAs, and More

  • 4 August 2020
  • 4 replies
  • 122 views

Userlevel 7
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Hi folks, 

Our customer base is quite atypical - we work with farmers. As you can probably assume, seasonality is therefore a huge factor in everything we do. As we begin to plan out the revamp of our health scorecard and think about our risk escalations, we are attempting to determine the best way of catering to the seasonality we know we face. For example, if usage is below X in January, that’s totally ok; but if it is below X in July, that is a huge red flag. To top it off, these seasons can vary between farms based on the type of crop they are focused on. That level of segmentation is a bit rough in our database, but I am working on making that information more useful as well. 

I would love to hear any ideas or thoughts on how to approach this!


4 replies

Userlevel 6
Badge +4

Hey @gunjanm, I have a couple ideas. 

One option would be to hold this data on some attributes in the Company object. For example, you could have a Season Start and Season End date fields. Or you could have a dropdown with some standard seasons or the same Season Start and Season End date fields that could show the months of the year. I think this could be useful but it would mean that you would have to manage this at the account level which might become a bit cumbersome if you have lots of accounts. 

Another option would be to keep a separate MDA table for Farming Seasons. The table could include something like: farm type, season start date, season end date. Or the inverse with the Off Season dates. And then I would add a Farm Type to the Company object. I suspect there might be some generalizations that you can add to this table that would generally apply to all farms. It may not be specific enough though if you are wanting to get daily accuracy on this.

Once you have the dates or months when a farm is off season, you could then add these exceptions to your scoring rules. What I would possibly recommend is marking the score as NA for out of season usage. And I would most likely add a field to the Summary or Attributes second that flags the company as out of season. That way CSMs will be able to easily see that a farm is out off season and can manage the account accordingly. 

 

If you do setup a system like this, I would suggest also leveraging these on season dates for CTAs and things like business reviews.

 

Userlevel 7
Badge +11

Yeah, I am definitely considering a dropdown for general “In Season” date ranges and using this to determine when one scoring makes more sense than another. Hashing this out is what will be the tricky part, and potentially loading a default status possibly based on region or crop types in order to hit the ground running. 

@jean.nairon this would essentially mean a separate scorecard depending on in and out of season, right? 

Userlevel 6
Badge +4

@gunjanm, you might be able to find a table online somewhere on crops and typical seasons in North America. I know I’ve found similar content on growing vegetables in my garden. 

I would create a second scorecard if you want to completely remove a measure when they are out of season. So if you have 5 measures for in season, and let’s say 3 measures during off season. The benefit is that CSMs won’t see measures that are irrelevant but this will mean you will need to update all your scorecard rules and might be a bit cumbersome to have your rules update two scorecards depending on the season. 

An alternate way that would be much easier to implement and maintain would be to just add a filter to your rule for off season and mark the measure as Null with a comment (ex. measure is null because the client is out of season). What I would do is add the filter to your actions. So action 1 would be the same as what you currently have and filtered for in-season. Action 2 would be filtered for off-season and mark the score as null with a comment. If a CSM decides the client is actually in-season, they could manually adjust the season and then the rules would run again to update the score.

That’s my two cents. Hope this helps!

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I’m with @jean.nairon on the alternate way. One scorecard filtered for out of season will be much easier to maintain over the long term. 

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