Logistics and transportation companies help arrange the movement of goods from producers to sellers, and ultimately to buyers. They transport goods via cargo ships, trucks, air, and rail. Within their network, they deal with vendors, warehouses, distribution centers, transportation routes and hubs, carriers, freight forwarders, freight brokers, importers, exporters, and more.
For the $4 trillion global logistics and transportation industry, ensuring the careful and timely delivery of pallets and packages requires superb coordination and communication.
Challenge:
Depending on the business, logistics and transportation companies use several communication channels (e.g. email, phone, and SMS) to facilitate communication between employees, brokers, agents, contractors, and customers. They use these channels to:
Coordinate freight and couriers
Receive location updates
Receive schedule changes
Send notifications of route changes
Send notifications of package delivery
Get alerted of any critical updates
Deliver impeccable customer service
Problems arise when multiple brokers, agents or other employees are all managing the same inbox. These teams can’t connect the dots between different conversations, and can’t keep up with the flow of information. This lack of clarity results in messages falling through the cracks, duplicative work, lost opportunities, failed deliveries and ultimately dissatisfied customers.
“Our brokers receive 1000+ emails a day. They get notified of ships open and ready to transport cargo or of cargo that is looking for transportation. They have to work through the requests and match the supply to the demand as quickly as possible. Missing a message means losing a sale.” – Chief Information Officer at Ship Brokerage Company
Front – The Inbox for Teams
Front is an inbox for teams that allows for great external communication based on seamless internal collaboration.
What it offers:
Unification: You can bring all of your external messages — group emails like Brokers@ or Warehouse@, plus SMS — into one unified inbox.
Collaboration: Key features like assigns, @mentions, and comments are built to promote seamless communication amongst team members.
Automation: To get through thousands of emails daily, Front has developed tags and action-based rules. Sort emails quickly, generate automatic replies based on the content of each email and achieve inbox zero in less time.
Mobility: We’ve learned from our logistics and transportation customers that their teams are often on the road. Our mobile applications enable your organization to take your inboxes and your team members with you anywhere you go.
Integrations: Logistics and transportation companies use third party software to track data (e.g. CRM). At Front, we have enabled our customers to connect to these systems via our native integrations or API to surface contextual information right within Front or sync work across these services.
Analytics: Track the performance of your team and company. Gain visibility into common customer requests and identify when you receive the highest volume of inquiries.
Key Benefits:
Achieve inbox zero daily: Ensure every incoming message is dealt with rather than buried, forgotten or missed.
Respond faster to inquiries at scale: Automating conversation routing or responses based on specific categories allows teams to go through a large volume of requests in now time.
“With Front, we can set up hundreds of rules that automatically trigger an action based on pre-defined categories. These automated actions enable our brokers to go through thousands of emails at a much quicker rate.”
– Chief Information Officer at Ship Brokerage Company
Never duplicate work again: Creating transparency and show who is working on what, prevent frustrations or confusions between teammates.
“By clearly seeing who is working on what Front prevents our brokers from filling the same entry with the US customs more than once. This is great because it is 10X as difficult to cancel the process with customs then filing it.”
– Thomas Korpolinski, Licensed U.S. Customs Broker at Near North
Gain visibility into your team’s activities: Make sure customers are put first by measuring how quickly your brokers or agents are responding to their requests.
Track key data to better manage your team: Identify when you receive high volumes of inquiries and staff your team appropriate to meet the demands of your customers.
Written by Mathilde Collin
Originally Published: 17 April 2020