It's not about how much volume you ship, it's about how much you value your customers

It is true. Just because a large forwarder may have large Customer Experience teams, they are perceived to be better at customer relationships. Where does this leave the competitive landscape for smaller forwarders?

Small forwarders are equally able to provide amazing levels of customer service, they may just have a few core clients to concentrate on.

One thing they all have in common, or should have, is how to ensure their customer service functions are running efficiently, if they exist at all.

Another thing they have in common is that they want to ensure that they can focus their best operators on their most valued customers and not on the tail end of the bell curve.

Often, even for a small account, you may well offer a client a dedicated account manager, but if we are all honest, we cannot afford to onboard new staff every time we onboard a new client. As such, the high quality often associated with a human asset is diluted to such an extreme that they cannot give enough care and attention to those key clients.

The Levitate philosophy adopts the notion that technology should do the job, and human assets should provide the added value. In so many situations we have seen lately, the technology offering is the value add proposition and not the human. We firmly believe that the technology on hand should do the job, whilst respecting clients needs for human hand holding.

Levitate was designed to address the 80% of your business that should only be demanding the 20% of your resources, but we all know thats much more. 

If you were to ask yourself, ‘what are the most frequently asked questions of my customers?’, are you confident that your technology offering can answer all of those questions? You would hope so, it takes an industry average of 96 minutes to get that question answered!

Levitate can be configured to speak directly to your enterprise data, securely, and provide adequate, real time responses immediately. As real time as your TMS is kept at least. It can also go some way to add value, for example: 

‘What is the status of shipment 101?’

– Shipment 101 is scheduled to arrive on 1/6

– Would you like to see it on a map, or receive notifications of any further updates?

‘Yes please’

– Sure no problem, we will alert you at all key milestones

Best part of this is that the app can be configured in your own vernacular or language set. Afterall, we want you to retain your personality whilst still using the app.

In closing, ask yourself these questions:

• Is my customer getting the best experience possible?
• Do I know what my operators are being asked?
• Have I explored all options to reduce the workload of my operators?
• Would my clients benefit from having my mobile app 24×7 or just my web app 9-5?
• Do I desire to have a competitive edge or differentiator?
• Do I know anyone who can build and deploy a custom app at very low cost?
• Can someone quickly create new functionality to be deployed through my app?
• Can I put a call to action directly into my customers hands, ‘Click here to book now?’
• Do my customers deserve to wait on average 96 mins to get a response?