John Deere | Connected Support™ Q&A

You want to open the box first?

Okay.

You think it's got your name on it?

Righto, let's do this. I can't open the box. I can.

You just met me at a barbecue. Tell me what you do for a living.

Usually what I say is I work for a John Deere dealer as a technical communicator.

I'm the person that the technicians will call or the customers will call when they simply can't go any further, when they literally don't have any avenues left to go to.

Which is basically the midpoint between a dealer's technicians and the John Deere factory experts. I keep hearing about connected sport. Explain it to me like I'm 12 years old.

You can keep track of all your toys and see where your siblings have taken them and put them and make sure that they are being looked after.

That's pretty good.

My 12 year old son's big on Instagram reels. He loves them. Connected support is like the piece of equipment is sending reels that it thinks is a funny or bad to the dealership. So the dealership can also watch them. I think that's. You get that. That'd probably make it through.

Yeah.

So what's your favorite piece of John Deere equipment?

Oh, usually all the green ones.

Yeah.

Yeah. Probably the 9,000, 770. Come on. Oh, it was just so reliable.

I think I like anything big and complicated.

To be honest. Sprayers are doing it for me at the moment.

7R210 because it's easiest to find in Service Advisor.

I like 100 series. 800 series tractor.

Mine would be the combines because there's so much technology.

For me it's got to be the motor grader.

I kind of like sprayers. You know, we've got some pretty good technology going on in the sprayers. But then again, I don't mind working with all the products really.

If you could have one item with you on a desert island, what would it be?

I wouldn't have a clue. Satellite phone to ring someone.

Probably a shed and everything that goes with it.

Yeah.

I don't know.

A phone, a flare gun. Get me off it.

I think for me I just have a boat. Turn around and go back home, fix it pretty quick. Is it true a tech can turn.

Up with the right parts due to remote diagnostics? 100%, yeah. 100%.

Yes, it can. Because you already done half the diagnostics behind the scene.

You know, from a quick phone call we can pick the error code. We can talk him through some basic diagnostics and we can find the failed part.

It's always nice for the farmer for a tech to turn up prepared as well. They know that they've, you know, obviously looked into that issue before they got there and if they can. Yeah, saves a lot of time downtime. Yeah, absolutely.

How can you predict issues in equipment before they happen?

Well, our connected support features are pretty amazing.

We've got expert alerts, we've got code monitoring, we've got machine health, we've got all of the connected tools that we can utilise through John Deere expert alerts.

A really good one for that.

Obviously it gives you a bit of.

A warning, not necessarily always an issue, but it gives that chance for that customer to engage in a repair or.

Sometimes you don't even have to go.

Out there, you know, and we proactively help customers, you know, we're able to pull those problems before their problems.

Does your mum understand what you do for a living?

No, I'm not sure I understand what.

My mum's not the most technical person, but.

Not a tractor operator.

Not a tractor operator. Doesn't even have a smartphone.

What's the furthest away a customer's been that you've helped with connected support?

How fast? Png, Papua New Guinea.

Probably about two, two and a half thousand k's away because our location is quite remote, so most of our customers 3, 400 kilometers. Yeah, that's where our branches are. So, yeah, but, yeah, probably the furthest one was about 2000 kms.

What's the best feedback you've received from customers using connected support?

Speed, the time it takes for help to get out there and the time it takes for diagnosing problems. That's usually the first thing they said. Wow, that was quick.

Yeah, absolutely. Yep. Yeah, that saving that downtime. The customers always, yeah, forever is grateful.

In a few months, I actually had a customer invite me to his wedding. He had a machine breakdown, four o' clock in the afternoon. The guys got on the phone. We were able to identify the problem pretty quick and, you know, obviously using our remote support features on the machines, I was on a motor grade specifically. The guy was able to do some checks over the phone for us. The next day, the workshop was there. They fixed the machine before he actually had to start work, so there was minimal downtime. And he invited me to his wedding. So I was pretty. I was pretty stoked for that. I actually did go, so, yeah, it was a good wedding. It was a great wedding.

Very good.

Is it true a John Deere customer can Monitor their equipment while sailing through the Mediterranean.

As long as you've got a phone signal, you can dial in and see what's happening basically in real time.

So, you know, if they've got a fleet of equipment back home and they have operators that operate it for them, they can be watching that pretty much live, you know, within, within, you know, certainly within minutes of something happening, they can know about it.

What's the biggest pickle you've rescued a customer from using connected support?

Probably 2022, 2023, they had all the floods and stuff out around Canamble and you just couldn't access the machines because it was either too wet, everything was underwater. So when a customer's machine started throwing codes so you could see what the codes were, do some live recordings, there was some people that were going out in and out in helicopters. So we were able to ship some parts to him and get his stuff sorted remotely without having to go there because we really couldn't get there.

It's hard to get a decent signal at my place. So how will connected support work, Starlink? That's the quick and easy answer.

I think the data requirements for a lot of it are pretty low.

Yeah. So if you're, you know, trying to get your harvest data, it'll just sit on the machine until it's got a decent, decent enough signal to send. There's been times where we've been on the phone with people and we've made them drive the machine to the top of the hill to help us with these things.

What's the funniest chat you've had while helping a customer?

The engine was misfiring and I asked him to have a look in the fuse box and the fuse box was a little bit melted and he says, yeah, the engine is crying. I said, well, if the fuse box looks like that, I will also cry.

Isn't everyone providing tools like this what sets John Deere apart?

Everyone is providing tools like this. However, not everyone has the same level of support and openness and future proofing that John Deere does. Connected support is, yeah, it's going to get better and it's going to continue to grow with every manufacturer. But John Deere has been very open about how they build it and sharing it with their customers as a standard.

So I think the word integration comes to mind. For sure. It's pretty seamless. The amount of resource that we have, the amount of connectivity that we have, and how it's all accessible in a fairly unique, easy to use platform's pretty crazy. Yeah, it's impressive.