3 Burning Questions for Freight Forwarders today

Whether it's the first month since starting your company or the second decade, you'd always look to improve your service quality and gain more profit.

Unless your business is a monopoly, the constant chiseling of your processes and evaluating your systems must be an ongoing activity. 

And if you are a freight forwarder, dealing with regular disruptions battles, your business improvement process doesn't get any easier. By navigating the constant dangers, you can only stay afloat. But to just survive is no longer the agenda for forwarders that have the ambition to capture a respectable market share. 

Forwarders' complexity of ever-fluctuating needs, changing customer demands, container shortage, and employee strikes - make it tough to keep a grip on all activities. To balance exceptional service and profitability requires questioning the traditional methods and a full-blown implementation of modern technology.

We attempt to answer the three most burning questions that freight forwarders face today.

1. How can I increase my profit margins?

Reducing your costs and keeping them that way is a great way to increase margins. But with the ever-changing freight conditions, lower costs alone won't suffice for an improved profit gain. When you work with an integrated freight forwarding software, you bring efficiency to your processes to complete more jobs and even do them better. By capturing company-wide data in a central location, you generate meaningful data insights that help you:

  • know your average job creation time
  • see the overall profitability of your jobs
  • spot places where your company's losing revenue

2. How can I eliminate errors and introduce management by exception?

On average, a user spends about 30 minutes entering data into a system for one complete shipment. This series of steps is repeated several times a day, every day. Turning to automation can not reduce your users' productivity but eliminate errors too. Specialized freight software has provisions like saved company details addresses, reusable templates for invoices, and smart auto-suggestions to speed up processing. 

With workflows, your teams can work seamlessly with interventions required only during exceptions. Exception management can be extended to approvals as well. An example can be - invoices above a certain amount to proceed only after the required approval.

3. How can I consistently deliver great customer service? 

According to a data source, 81% of customers attempt to find solutions themselves before contacting customer care executives. Your customer service will have an easier time if your freight solution is simple to navigate and can help find answers themselves. Forwarders that timely notify their customers about their shipment progress can avoid handling frantic calls and emails. If you wish to gain higher customer loyalty and retention, bettering your customer satisfaction should be your goal. To achieve greater customer referral rates and satisfaction, freight ERP with CRM is a useful solution. The solution becomes deeply integrated with your functions and handles auto-notifying your customer of every milestone completion.

Maximizing freight output

Being consistent is key to earning a higher profit margin. And with technology, you're guided to discover more ways to save costs and process shipments faster to achieve your targets. Robust financial processes help keep tight control on the expenses. Implementing an ERP may sound earth-shattering, but compared to the benefits it brings, the returns will help maximize customer satisfaction and profits.

Originally Published in Portcalls Asia Magazine

https://www.portcalls.com/3-burning-questions-for-freight-forwarders-today/

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