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Items filtered by date: February 2015 - Logistics Worldwide Express

With globalization, the world has literally become a global village

As a result of open trade policies, everyday, more businesses are going global making the whole world a new marketplace. While it benefits the consumers with lower pricing and availability of variety of products, the businesses are challenged with fierce competition. In logistics industry, the competition is even worse considering the number of factors which affect the business. In such cut-throat competition, how can logistics companies be successful?

To succeed, logistics companies must focus on being more competitive to enhance customer satisfaction and attract more business. Although, many of the freight and logistics businesses strive to be competitive, the challenge is that they all are focusing only on a single factor – Pricing. Yes, we all may have to be competitive on pricing sometime or the other. This happens not only for the customers who always want cheaper pricing and discounts but also because of the competitors providing aggressive prices. When everybody is trying to provide better pricing, freight forwarders and logistics companies must set themselves apart by being more competitive on other important business functions. Let us see how –

  1. Be more competitive on Technology

Freight and logistics companies must change their perception about IT as expenditure or merely a support function. Technology has grown to be the critical and core business function across the industries and logistics is no exception. Effective use of IT in Logistics companies gives them an edge to be more competitive. From Warehousing to Freight Forwarding to Customs Clearance to Tracking and Visibility to Information Reporting and Customer Support, Logistics Software has an essential role to play. Usingend-to-end freight and logistics software helps in the Integration of logistics functions, creating collaboration and communication platform for EDI and sharing real-time information across the supply chain. Including faster communication, simplified operations and improved customer interaction, the benefits of technology are abundant.

  1. Be more competitive on Customer Service

Customer service teams of LSPs spend most of their time today in providing customers with the status updates about their shipments. This process is very time consuming and costly as it vastly involves human interaction. Freight forwarders and logistics companies can use visibility solutions to automate and standardize the cargo tracking to send the auto-alerts and updates directly to the customers. This does not only empower the customers with end-to-end visibility across the supply chain but also reduces the time and efforts that are spent in customer service activities and considerably lowers the cost. Quick, accurate & timely communication of essential information greatly helps in enhancing customer satisfaction.

Customer loyalty is directly proportional to customer satisfaction. CRM integrated with freight forwarding software is the most useful tool to enhance customer loyalty and profitability. Using CRM for in-depth analysis of potential customers helps in better understanding of the customer requirements and to develop customer loyalty strategy to serve the customers in best possible way.

  1. Effectively use available data to improve competitiveness

In recent times, the value of data has grown dramatically due to the availability of easy to use analytics and reporting software. Data analytics and reporting is very important for freight and logistics companies, because they have hundreds of transactions per day with thousands of partners in their global networks and every one of those transactions creates data. Analysing this data for identifying various patterns helps freight and logistics companies to manage their operations more effectively. With precise and crisp information, they can optimize the resource utilization, service offerings, delivery times etc. This is just the tip of the iceberg and the unseen possibilities are limitless.

Competitive market is very important as it results in overall market development and brings benefits to the end consumer. Even though, avoiding competition completely is not possible today, Logistics companies can boost their competitiveness to stay ahead. By being assertive about exceeding customer satisfaction at every step and by continuous improvement in operations freight and logistics companies can conquer the competition.

Fore more articles from Amit, click the link here

Source :by AmitMaheshwari, CEO, Softlink ( Global Logistics Media )

Published in News