Want a Winning Customer Experience? First, Unite Your Teams

By Mike Meyerring, Chief Revenue Office at Tractor Zoom

In 2025, many equipment dealers acknowledged a need to level-up their business tools if they were going to grow despite a tough economy. Those dealers bold enough to embrace change contributed to Tractor Zoom growing nearly 40% last year, a pace of growth we hadn’t experienced in prior years. 

Many dealerships that grow organically or through mergers and acquisitions use systems and follow processes that likely weren’t created for businesses scaling quickly. In a similar way Tractor Zoom’s rapid organic growth challenged us to rethink how we can deliver exceptional customer experiences at scale. To this end, I did the one thing that I know makes the biggest impact:I brought all of our customer-facing team members together to collaborate and develop our new strategy.

Tractor Zoom has three teams that customers rely on every day: 

• As a new customer, our Onboarding team is the first group of faces you’ll get to know. They manage the project, help customers think through the platform builds, and prepare them for rollout and quick adoption. 
• The next team you’ll meet is our Customer Success team, and they are our customers' main point of contact following the critical “Go Live” moment. They help customers troubleshoot and plan, and they are ultimately responsible for ensuring customers get the most out of our platforms to grow their business. 
• Last but not least are our unsung heroes, the Professional Services team. These individuals are the technical brains behind the scenes building all the unique workflows, fields, objects, and more so our customers have a tailored solution that sets them up for success.

When I think about our own employee structure, these three roles seem an awful lot like the Sales, Service, and Parts teams our Dealer partners use to run their operations. If these departments  are not in lock step, the customer experience suffers. This quickly leads to eroding customer loyalty and reputational damage in the market. If we at Tractor Zoom aim to be a leader in this industry, then it is imperative that we close any of our own communication gaps and set the standard of excellence. 

For growing companies, change is a constant reality and communication is usually the first link in the chain that breaks. That’s why we gathered  all of our team members together at our headquarters for a full eight-hour workshop. The main objective?To build trust across the teams and compose the next chapter of Customer Experience at Tractor Zoom.  

As I do with most large group sessions, I had the team revisit the “Why Tractor Zoom” message. We sit squarely in the middle of connecting dealers with producers who build and feed the world. To have the greatest impact, it is vitally important that we work hard to help our customers(and future customers) grow. This in turn allows us to build out our own teams and products. We level-set  on our common mission: We are all here to help grow our customers' business. 

We then rolled up our sleeves and dove into the workshop, breaking down barriers and pushing each other to clarify our perspectives. We dug into crucial cross-team topics:  

“Does Customer Success truly know what the biggest obstacles are for our Professional Services team?” 

“Does Onboarding understand what Customer Success’s biggest victories are?” 

“Can Professional Services articulate the impediments that Onboarding goes through?” 

The concept of this portion of the workshop is simple to understand, yet hard to execute. Do we have enough empathy to internalize what gets in the way of our peers delivering the best customer experience possible? As the workshop rolled on, you could see the alignment starting to take shape, and we could see how everything these teams do has a direct impact on our customers and on other employees. And this also brought home the truth that one leg isn’t any more important than the other — all three teams must work together if we expect to build a sustainable business with customers who rave about us. 

Once we had a solid foundation of trust amongst the team and an understanding of the importance of their collaboration, we moved on to identifying our shared challenges: “What gets in the way of all of us delivering an excellent customer experience?” “What annoys our customers?” “What do our customers love?” “What do we control?” 

What started as a laundry list of complaints was quickly narrowed down to the real issues and their root causes And then the fun part began — seeing who could come up with the best solution to solve the problem. We broke into teams with a mix of employees from all three roles and assigned problems for each group to tackle in under 45 minutes.

To say 45 minutes wasn’t enough time to solve problems would be a massive understatement. It takes much, much longer to create fully vetted solutions to major blockers. But that wasn’t really the point of the exercise. The point was to get everyone to recognize that, when they work together as a single unit, the ability to ideate possible solutions is limitless. The energy was palpable.

As the workshop came to a close, you could see the team was tired and yet energized. A full day of critical thinking and collaboration will do that to you. The concern shared by all was “Why will it work this time?” That fear created by past commitments unfulfilled crept into the minds of a few. But our team leaders were determined that that failure was not an option for this group. 

As they all narrowed their focus on next steps, owners, and timelines, you could see the commitment to their colleagues, to our customers, and to themselves really shine. Everyone said their goodbyes with their directives in hand. What comes next will be a continued evolution of Tractor Zoom’s best-in-class Customer Experience, helping our customers grow their business by leveraging tools and resources that are unique to us. 

Our customers are never operating alone, and we will never stop evolving to help them achieve more. Unifying our core customer-facing teams is and will continue to be a central part of this evolution.