ITF Group is a full-service 3PL (3rd Party Logistics) transportation company based in St. Louis, Missouri. After starting out as a small team, they’ve grown rapidly across multiple offices in the area, as well as one overseas in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. ITF’s clients are typically in warehousing, shipping, receiving, manufacturing, and more who need warehousing, fulfillment, and transportation services in the U.S. and Canada.
Challenge
As ITF Group expanded to multiple offices—one of which on the other side of the world—they needed a way to better collaborate with each other, because Gmail just wasn’t cutting it. After the team started growing, they began having workflow problems. Communicating with other team members was slow, complicated, and clunky. Gmail isn’t built for teams.
They were also using Telegram, which helped speed up internal communication, but if there were client emails that needed to be shared, they had to forward them and hope for a reply.
ITF needed a way to merge simple internal communication with project workflows built around emails. They needed Front!
We were really wanting to use a tool that could give us group collaboration even if we are working across the world. It’s a great team software and I love how easily I can communicate with my colleagues overseas.
Solution
In 2018, ITF Group got Front. The software had all the functions they needed to solve their communication issues. Front onboarded the team, trained them, and partnered with them to build custom workflows. But the relationship didn’t stop there. “Basically, they started growing with us,” said Alex Abedallah, Logistics Supervisor. “Compared to the beginning, the software became much more sophisticated.”
I loved the app from first sight. ITF always looks at new technology and follows industry trends to keep the most advanced technology in terms of communication and internal system optimization.
ITF went live with Front almost immediately. The Front team learned about ITF’s internal workflows and structure to better train each team—all of which use the software. Front integrates with Zoom and Twilio to expand Front’s usefulness into video, voice, and SMS channels.
Commenting is one of the favorite features of Front at ITF Group, and they also use templates, rules, tags, and more on a daily basis. “Automation using rules is probably the best thing ever added in the program,” said Alex Abedallah. “We currently have 35 rules—all functional. That saves a lot of employees’ time and energy simply by deleting unnecessary emails, directing the email to the appropriate parties, and so on. Team inboxes work like magic, no need to sign in and out on multiple tabs.”
Results
ITF showed exponential growth (about 130%) in the 2020-2021 season and became the fastest-growing private business in St. Louis. “We can confidently say that Front has contributed to our prosperity substantially,” said Alex Abedallah.
Customers can get quicker responses, since teams can easily communicate internally—especially when there are fast-evolving client issues. “Our customers thoroughly enjoy how quickly we can respond and handle their issues,” said Hollan Harrison. “We have people who can get quick answers even after hours due to the easy-to-use mobile apps and team sharing.”
And with Front’s built-in analytics, ITF can track those improvements. They track response time, reaction time, emails sent, messages sent, assigned conversations, reply times, and more. Before Front, finding out that critical data wasn’t possible. Front helped ITF measure the workload of each employee and assess their performance in real-time. That capability enables them to distribute workloads fairly among team members.
I can say that response time improved twice, meaning now our guys spend less time responding to emails. Accessing company emails on the same platform saves tremendous time of ours that would have been spent on switching between tabs and windows, logging in and out.
