In recent months, transport and logistics firms have been cited as the backbone of the UK’s Covid-19 frontline, whether by switching their usual services to focus on deliveries of PPE and medical equipment, or, by their support of a huge number of e-commerce businesses delivering essential and consumer goods to everyone working and isolating in their homes.
Both during the crisis and moving towards slightly more normal times, success for transport and logistics companies is grounded in customer experience: meeting expectations – from pick-up through to delivery. Providing end-to-end satisfaction is crucial to create loyalty, building reputation and ensuring growth.
In an increasingly competitive market with tight margins – where services must be delivered on-time as well as on-budget, it’s critical for transport and logistics firms to manage all aspects of quotes and orders efficiently and accurately, often taking into consideration a broad number of variable costs and differing circumstances.
Therefore, to keep customers happy and to meet customer expectations and needs, transport and logistics firms are digitising many of their processes and leveraging technology to create competitive advantages. And CRM is at the core of it. A powerful combination of task automation, communications, information management, location mapping and an ability to simplify the full order process makes CRM a must-have technology for transport and logistics companies.
What are the 5 top benefits of CRM experienced by transport and logistics organisations?
Manage customer incidents and monitor SLAs: Ensure that you have complete visibility of all incidents and a 360-view of customer account history. Dashboard reporting helps to highlight preferred services for customers and ensures that they always get offered the best fit service for their needs.
Get Marketing and Sales Insights: CRM brings marketing and sales into one platform. In addition to being able to monitor customer buying behaviour, you can also track new leads coming from a variety of digital channels and anticipate customer needs effectively.
Simplify Quotations, manage contracts and keep track of profit: Managing variables across routes, schedules, geographies or currencies can be complex, you need a way to simplify your quote process and account for any levy’s or import taxes. You can also ensure that all contracts are stored in one place setting up renewal reminders for your sales team ensuring no missed revenue opportunities. CRM not only enables you to manage complex quotations but also enables you to analyse them by several financial variables to ensure that you can always meet profit goals.
Improve Customer Experience: Keep your customers informed at every touchpoint by automating communications throughout the delivery cycle. Set communication preferences for each customer and ensure that if there are any changes to the service along the way that these are properly communicated.
Integrate with bespoke logistics software: Connect CRM with your TMS (Transport Management System) as well as point of delivery (POD) trackers, so you can easily see the status and location of a particular customer’s packages and pallets.
In summary, all the features above can help your transport and logistics business to improve your customer experience, manage sales pipeline or marketing campaigns as well as identify and retain valuable customers.
If you’re thinking about starting your CRM journey or are looking for a new solution make sure you’re asking the right questions with our Evaluating CRM Guide.
