How Can Better Data Management Improve Customer Service in the Freight Forwarding Industry?

Within the freight and logistics industry, customer service has long been a pain point, not only for shippers but for freight forwarders too. Shippers, eager to get their goods quickly and securely from their origin point to destination, have to contend with a slow, often frustrating process, undermining their experience as a whole.

Forwarders, on the other hand, are constantly battling to stay active and responsive in an already-competitive industry. Juggling multiple incoming shipping requests from shippers, working with multiple partners at each stage and navigating a vast influx of unstructured data from every angle.

It's not hard to see why freight forwarders struggle to prioritize the customer experience in their service and shippers, on the other hand, are left feeling frustrated at the lack of customer service received.

Unstructured data, manual, outdated processes and limited operational visibility leave forwarders with their hands tied in terms of efficiency. The entire end-to-end experience is riddled with slow, inefficient processes.

For freight forwarders, delivering customer service is the silver bullet to winning more shipping proposals and repeat, ongoing business with shippers. This makes enhancing customer service a top priority, but again, how do shippers improve their customer service when they're weighed down by their own internal inefficiencies?

The key, ironically, lies in the unstructured data causing a significant portion of these inefficiencies. By mastering their data management and embracing automation, forwarders can unlock greater efficiency gains, allowing them to enhance and maximize the quality of their customer service.

How Can Better Data Management Improve the Customer Experience for Shippers?

Through better data management, freight forwarders can unlock a host of efficiencies that benefit their productivity, performance, accuracy, margins and even scalability. The key to improving data management is investing in a robust and agile data management platform, centralizing your data in a single place.

StarDox, for example, structures, cleanses and enriches your incoming freight and shipping data, boosting your data visibility and producing insights that can improve accuracy and margins.

Let's take a closer look at how some of the benefits of better data management can improve customer service and the customer experience as a whole.

Supercharge response times

Using AI and advanced ML models, StarDox structures and enriches your incoming shipping data from both shipper and carriers. Using this enriched data, it generates accurate, dynamic multi-lane shipping proposals with up to 4% boosted margins.

It does this at scale effortlessly, allowing you to accept and create an unlimited number of shipping requests, generating accurate proposals in minutes, supercharging your response times.

Build better relationships

StarDox automates repetitive, manual data management processes, from data cleansing, structuring, enrichment, correction and centralisation. Its advanced analytics provide swift, clear insights into key business areas, giving you an overview of all your operations instantly.

All of this frees up your team's time - time that they can refunnel into more important tasks like building better customer relationships and adding more value to their experience.

Increase accuracy, minimize errors and delays

StarDox leverages AI to analyze historical and contextual data to fill in pesky data gaps that slow down the shipping process, as well as autocorrect errors or inaccuracies, all without the need for any manual intervention on your part.

Enhanced data accuracy leaves a narrower gap for errors to slip through the cracks and resultant delays, allowing you to deliver a swifter, more accurate proposal to shippers with faster turnaround times.

Provide better visibility

Shippers want to engage with forwarders who have fully embraced digital transformation as part of their processes and can leverage technology to enhance the quality of service they deliver. In a recent survey, it was found that 80% of respondents said they would pay more to work with forwarders with better tech and visibility.

Investing in a robust data management platform gives you the visibility you need to make swift, agile decisions in response to shipper's requests. It arms you with the real-time information you need to handle shippers' queries and concerns and presents them with a clear view of their shipment's status, no matter where it is.

Conclusion

Enhancing your customer service as a freight forwarder necessitates improving your internal data aggregation and management processes, centralizing your data in one, unified interface and automating your communication and proposal creation procedures. It's a multi-layered endeavor that requires enhancement and augmentation of all your existing processes, not just communication.

However, while the challenges are numerous, the solution is singular and simple: invest in a data management platform like StarDox that performs all of the solutions above, giving you the competitive edge you need to elevate your customer service experience and propel ahead past competitors.

See StarDox in Action