Expeditus Transport is a renowned expedited freight provider. Since its beginnings in 2012, the company has expanded from an “ambulance service for freight” into a top-tier 3PL solution, servicing virtually every mode of transportation, from air to flatbed.
Despite its tremendous growth, one thing has remained consistent — the company’s commitment to serving any customer who needs rush-critical freight at any time. You can call Expeditus at 10am, 8pm, or 2am and trust that they’ve got you covered. As their slogan goes, “We say what we do, and we do what we say.”
They’re able to deliver the high-quality, fast service customers count on using a powerful tech one-two punch: Front and Everest AI.
Challenge
Expeditus receives tens of thousands of load opportunities per day. Before working with Front and Everest, Expeditus’s 20-person team used a combination of Outlook routing rules and TMS tooling to sort through the abundance of emails.
But that was just the first step. Once an agent identified a potential contract driver for a customer’s load, they needed to confirm that the driver had enough hours left in their shift, had reasonable pricing, and would accept the assignment — which happened over multiple phone calls and emails.
As the company grew, this multi-step process was no longer sustainable. Expeditus hit Outlook’s rule limits, causing multiple agents to pick up and respond to the same customer request. Even when they weren’t duplicating efforts, teammates spent considerable time going back and forth with the customer and the owner-operator of the truck, verifying specific dimensions, weight capacity, and other requirements.
Expeditus set out to dramatically increase the number of loads they could cover without sacrificing the white-glove service that sets them apart. As Erich Tremblay, VP of Business Development at Expeditus, points out:
“I brought all of the directors into the office and said, ‘We need to get better. All we have to do is run one load for someone, they are going to see the process we run, and they’re going to want to come back, so how do we increase the number of loads we are bidding on?’”
Solution
Erich and his boss, Expeditus President and Founder Adam Scuralli, began searching for technology that could help them scale.
Adam called his colleagues to see if they ran into similar coordination challenges and what they used to solve them. Front was the most common answer. Its powerful workflow automation, collaboration, and shared visibility would help Expeditus maintain the same level of service as it grew.
At the same time, Erich met the founder of Everest, an AI assistant for logistics, at a conference. Integrating Everest with Front would automatically surface the data agents needed to confirm a load, eliminating the frustrating and time-consuming process of combing through emails or other systems. Erich highlights:
We looked at a couple of other solutions and even trial-tested a few. Nothing was comparable to Front and Everest. The ease of use, interoperability, and each team’s openness to feedback was unmatched.
Streamlining message routing and improving accountability for top-notch service
Instead of dealing with double replies or missed messages, Front’s scalable message routing ensures each request is handled by one person. Thanks to Everest, that person has all the information they need to respond to an RFQ at their fingertips. In one click, they can draft an email with the dimensions, weight, and price, then personalize the message as they see fit. The seamless Front and Everest integration has enabled Expeditus to quadruple the capacity they are able to handle from 500 loads a day to over 2,000.
If anything happens with a load, the entire team has visibility and can take action, even if they weren’t the original rep.
“If a customer needs an update, their request isn’t going to go to a dead box or to somebody that’s off on vacation and not paying attention,” Erich explains. “Our reps always tag a tracking team so that if something happens with a driver, the on-call team can notify the customer right then and there.”
Expeditus’s TMS is hooked up to Everest as well. If a customer responds to TMS emails or texts regarding a load departure or arrival, reps can reply directly in Front and Everest without having to switch between systems.
Real-time collaboration has also improved speed and quality of response. Team members can loop in their manager or peer with a simple @mention if they have questions, want input on a tricky situation, or are transferring a load to someone else.
With all these features built directly into the agent workflow, nothing important slips through the cracks, and customers and drivers get fast replies, 24/7.
Responding in record time with an all-in-one communications platform
Using Front’s rules and message templates, Adam and Erich have standardized the customer service process. Every load offer gets a tag to ensure that the load is properly tracked and serviced. Every email contains specific information. Every customer request requires a response within a specific period of time.
Combined with an intuitive UI from Everest, these guardrails have also helped new hires onboard quickly. Erich shares, “We take someone with hardly any training, show them briefly how things work, and they’re already putting loads on the board. Everest and Front are very simple to use. They put everything in front of you. It’s like, ‘here you go, here’s the freight, here’s the loads, execute.’”
With Everest, customer response time has gotten better — and now the team can actually measure it.
Before, we didn’t have any tools that tracked our speed. Now, I can quantify our response time. It’s gone up by 500%.
In Front, the team can monitor communication performance in real time and find ways to improve response time and customer satisfaction. And in Everest, they can investigate win/loss data to address operating inefficiencies and make data-driven optimizations to pricing that help Expeditus maintain its competitive edge.
Where Expeditus is expanding next with Front and Everest
With Front and Everest, Expeditus has gotten bookings down to two clicks. One to confirm the driver has accepted the offer and one to send the information downstream — a five minute time-saver from their previous process.
But they’re working on making the process even more seamless by presenting load offers to drivers via the Everest app. The contractors will be able to select which load they want to work on, their request pops up in the Expeditus system, and reps can create and send quotes via Front. Ideally, the whole process will run without reps ever having to call the driver.
Because of the company’s success integrating Front and Everest into their operations, Expeditus is also thinking about adding accounting, recruiting, and safety to Front, with the goal of optimizing the end-to-end customer experience.
So far, Expeditus has saved over 25,000 hours and quadrupled its capacity using Front and Everest. But most importantly, the company hasn’t wavered in its commitment to top-notch customer service.
As Erich puts it, “Our backend processes are set up to make sure your freight is babied from the time it’s dispatched to the time it’s delivered. We’re only able to do that with such efficiency because of Front and Everest. They really helped our business get to the next level.”
