What are the most important success factors in logistics and freight forwarding?
The factors that affect the industry the most are the client’s expectations, technology adoption, human resources, and supply chain management.
COVID-19 has forced freight business owners to rethink their business strategy, as the industry evolves from an efficient delivery system to a marketing mechanism with customer satisfaction at its center. There is also a growing focus on technology to acquire and retain customers. Moreover, the phenomenal growth of e-commerce has brought customer-centric control as the defining focus of the freight industry.
Let’s look at the changes that will set the default trend for the freight forwarding industry.
Building brands through customer experience
The industry is expected to move away from just faster delivery operations to a customer-centric mechanism that includes customer experiences, speed of delivery, transparency, and visibility.
Traditionally the industry follows a legacy customer communication system, one that includes communication through email and phone, which is time-consuming and painful for both your employees and customers.
Investing in cloud technology can help reduce complexity and streamline communications to make the customer journey smooth. The centralized database is an integrated freight forwarding software that aims to help your customers track, manage, and confirm accurate shipment delivery, resulting in a seamless customer experience.
Digitizing the freight forwarding business
To deliver interconnected experiences and seamless interactions across platforms, digital transformation is required. This will enable communication, documentation, analytics, and the processes of booking, ordering, and inventory to be standardized and the customer’s experience to be simplified. This means analyzing your supply chain through the lens of your customers to understand the pain areas and work upon those parameters.
Digital technologies not only help to improve communication channels and automate manual work, they also eliminate the hurdles of manual processes, legacy systems, and repetitive tasks. The software should allow the freight forwarders to automate and centralize the booking and documentation process, and enable collaboration with all stakeholders in real time on a single system.
Intelligent system to plan operations in advance
The holy grail of transformation is to combine operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. No one can predict the future exactly, but having the right tools to predict and plan will help you meet the challenges ahead. Logistics leaders need to empower themselves with the data revolution and use analytics to identify the shipping patterns, high-performing customers, and cash-flow requirements to plan and estimate the overall business performance.
This might look a daunting task, but the first step towards future prediction of operations is to collect the right data. Well-designed systems or software can help you collect and centralize data across various platforms and operations. With centralized data you can accurately track freight expenses, operational performance, and inventory turnover.
All the trends point to the emergence of a next-generation freight movement that will help strengthen your customer relationships and operational efficiency. Leaders should understand where the market is headed, how their competitors and customers are reacting, and take steps today to avoid any uncertainties tomorrow.
