Customer-centric strategies for freight forwarders

It’s not a secret to any forwarder around the world that the forwarding industry is quite complex and full of high-stakes. That’s why building customer-centric strategies for freight forwarders is so important to ensure the success of your clients.

Book a shipment at the last minute, juggling countless communication channels with partners and carriers, and the current missteps in the documentations make forwarders’ jobs a lot difficult, especially when operating in a traditional way.

However, some freight forwarders are already managing to reduce those problems by using technology and customer-centric strategies as an ally to improve the business.

Maintaining success in a freight forwarding company for the coming years depends on retaining this mindset: company culture, and building positive customer experiences. 

While we were talking with Raghavendran Viswanathan Founder and CEO of Freightify, one of the biggest startups in India, we gathered some points to help you establish customer-centric strategies for freight forwarders as a culture in your company. 

After all, what is customer experience (CX)?

CX is the set of actions taken to improve and optimize interactions between consumers and companies throughout the phases of the relationship process: pre, during, and after-sales.

The customer experience must occur during the whole process, it can never stop. And the reason is really simple, once your forwarders partners feel happy with the services you are providing the more chances there are for them to come back, and to recommend your freight forwarder to others. 

A positive customer experience enables your forwarder business to grow, but one bad experience can take down your company in a matter of seconds. As Warren Buffet states, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.”

How to build a customer-centric strategy in your freight forwarder company?

As we have mentioned before, bringing a customer experience to the center of your freight forwarder company is the main key to success. In order to establish this kind of strategy, technology must be your number one ally. 

1. Bring data to your day-to-day work: If you continue to keep the data of your forwarder partners in your mind you will never be able to improve your forwarder company and understand your customer’s needs. Look for a digital platform for freight forwarders that allows you to analyze your partnership data. In case you want to know about Parnity’s analysis tool click here.

2. Rate with qualified carries: Once you start establishing good partnerships the pricing job will get a lot faster and easier. The ideal is to have at least three partners in each country your forwarder works with and prioritize them for quotations. To keep track of all this information a management tool will make the process easier. Parnity’s management tool can help you with that! 

3. Automate your forwarders process: If you are still working with spreadsheets to automate your processes you are going to keep wasting time. With a tool to help you automate the process of your freight forwarder, you can save almost half of the time of your teamwork and avoid errors.

4. Think about your partner’s priority, not yours: It’s common to think that your forwarder’s priorities are more important than your client’s, but that is not the right mindset to grow your business. Using a CRM tool the chances of retaining forwarders partner are much better. 

Customer-centric strategies are crucial to any business, especially for freight forwarders. Once you start putting your customer in the center of your business your forwarder company will start to improve at a high level.

Watch our full conversation with Raghavendran Viswanathan.