Logistics Group International (LGI) is a third-party logistics company specializing in moving large equipment, dry freight, and temperature-controlled cargo across the US, Mexico, and Canada.
Over the past two decades, LGI has become the preferred logistics partner for over 1,500 companies. And it’s not just because of their vast carrier network, no give-back policy, or commitment to safety. What really stands out is LGI’s unparalleled service.
Every team member strives to elevate the customer and carrier experience with each interaction, responding to quote requests, shipment questions, and carrier issues quickly and efficiently — and they do it all with Front.
Challenge
Originally, LGI used Outlook to manage shipper and carrier communication. But heaps of distribution lists led to high message volume, lack of clear ownership, and hindered productivity. Without guardrails in place, agents sometimes sent duplicate emails or dropped the ball altogether, thinking another team member was on it.
Brandon Bay, EVP at LGI, shares, “When I got here 4 years ago, it was the same story, different brokerage. Everyone was sending emails to a distro list. People were replying to messages 2 to 3 times because they didn’t know who owned them.”
Ownership also became a challenge from a workload perspective — managers didn’t know how much one direct report was working on compared to another, making proper staffing and holding employees accountable harder.
Collaboration was an issue, too. If team members had questions, they’d have to forward emails to their supervisor for review. That supervisor would then scroll through the entire email chain to find the information to help craft an answer, prolonging the time customers went without a response.
Solution
LGI needed to invest in technology in order to reach the next level of growth. Brandon implemented Front at his previous brokerage to increase agent productivity while keeping a high bar for service, and he was ready for round two.
“People are resistant to change at first, but by the time new folks go through Front Academy, after one day, they say, ‘I don’t know if I can ever go back to Outlook.’”
Quicker response rates with automatic routing
Instead of creating and managing separate distribution lists for each team and each customer, Brandon uses a series of Front rules to categorize and assign inbound messages.
Today, all LGI inquiries flow into shared inboxes. From there, Front rules determine what kind of request it is and send it to the appropriate “pod” inbox to work.
Requests for quotes go to the sales pod inbox
Billing questions go to the accounting team for review
Shipper and carrier questions go to the support team for quick responses
If the message is from an existing customer, Front looks up the account owner using data from McLeod, LGI’s TMS, and assigns the message to them.
Being in the freight business for 10 years, I’ve realized I can’t control much. But what I can control is our communication. Great customer communication is what separates us from competitors.
These routing rules have not only improved response times, they’ve also eliminated frustrating back-and-forth for the customer. Customers only have to send one email, knowing their question will get to the right person, and an answer will arrive in their inbox shortly.
To ensure nothing falls through the cracks, Front features like shifts and time off ensure that messages always go to available teammates, allowing LGI to maintain seamless communication with customers and carriers.
Faster issue resolution with built-in collaboration features
Rather than forwarding emails to their boss for approval, LGI employees now tag managers directly in their drafts, showing exactly where help is needed. At the same time, Front’s Contacts Manager automatically surfaces relevant customer information and recent conversations, giving supervisors enough context to answer questions quickly and accurately.
LGI uses this process to collaborate cross-departmentally, too. Accounting might loop in a dispatcher and sales rep to resolve a billing issue. Sales might loop in a logistics coordinator to help handle escalations from upset customers or carriers.
We are non-stop looping people in for approvals and visibility. We have full conversations in Front without switching to Microsoft Teams, making our customer response rates faster.
Front’s message templates also speed up communication. Instead of writing emails from scratch, employees can pull up pickup request or lumper code templates, make a few modifications, and send their email, moving on to the next item in their inbox.
Better visibility and fraud detection with Front’s Highway integration
Fraud is one of the biggest threats facing the logistics industry, and combating it takes valuable time away from serving customers. Not only that, falling victim to a scam could result in cargo theft, severely harming LGI’s reputation.
Outlook made it tough to identify and block potential fraud, leaving it up to an individual agent to make mission-critical decisions. Front, on the other hand, has an integration with Highway, a carrier identity platform, which identifies and quarantines potential fraud before it can get to employees’ hands.
“Scammers are getting more sophisticated, so we have to get more sophisticated with how we stop them. Front and Highway automates the initial screening, allowing us to drill down on potential fraud, and make quick decisions.”
To prevent fraudsters from returning, Brandon created a “bad actor” rule in Front that flags fraudulent carriers if they try to contact LGI through a different channel, keeping agents on track while protecting the LGI business.
Maximized brokerage productivity with technology investments
As margins in the logistics market have gotten thinner, LGI has had to figure out how to cut costs. Instead of adjusting headcount to keep up, the LGI team doubled down on its technology investments, expanding Front to all business units, and bringing on new software like Greenscreens.ai and Vooma.
The results speak for themselves. LGI saves 12,000+ hours a year thanks to Front’s automation capabilities, productivity features, and integrations, enabling them to cover more loads per person per day.
It’s about making each step of the operation, from quoting to tendering to billing to collecting, more efficient. That’s why our whole company is on Front.
With a more productive and responsive workforce, LGI’s revenue has grown by 3x in the last four years.
Brandon explains, “We’re not replacing people with technology. We are trying to optimize technology to increase the capacity of our people. And we really, really just want to take care of our customers and carriers.”
With the right team and the right tech stack in place, LGI can maintain the customer focus and efficiency it needs to reach the next million-dollar milestone.
