The transportation and logistics experts at Tai have identified eight common areas of the freight brokerage process where inefficiencies and bottlenecks cause headaches for your team and customers. These problems waste labor and resources. They can also delay customer responses, resulting in decreased customer satisfaction. Reduced margins and profitability are the end results.
In this blog, we’ll explore how Tai TMS can optimize the order-receiving process (area of improvement #1), making it smoother, faster, and more reliable, positioning your business for growth and success. Let’s start with a story.
A Typical Monday Morning at XYZ Logistics
It’s Monday morning at XYZ Logistics, a mid-sized freight brokerage company. Because they rely on email orders from their customers, each rep’s inbox is overflowing with emails. Among these, a crucial order from a major client, ABC Manufacturing, is buried. This order is for a time-sensitive load that must reach its destination within 24 hours to meet a critical production deadline.
Because of the sheer volume of emails and the manual process, the XYZ Logistics team doesn’t notice the order until several hours later. By the time they begin processing it, they realize that most of their preferred carriers are already booked for the day. In a rush, they have to find a less dependable carrier at a higher cost, leading to increased expenses and a potential delay in delivery. When they finally responded to the customer, they found that the customer booked the load with a competitor who had responded to the order promptly.
The company’s operations manager was frustrated. How could this have happened? The answer is clear. The order was doomed from the start, buried in an avalanche of emails. The manager vowed to find a better way to receive orders.
The Order Receiving Process
The order-receiving process is a cornerstone for any freight brokerage aiming to scale. It’s more than just taking orders. It’s about ensuring that every shipment is accurately and swiftly processed to meet demand and build strong carriers and customer relationships.
An inefficient order-receiving process can hinder your growth potential. If you want to stay competitive and drive your business forward, you must address the common barriers to improving this critical area of your process.
The Barriers to Email Orders
If your order-receiving process relies on email, you’re most likely experiencing several barriers, including:
Imagine a solution that automates and streamlines your order-receiving process, eliminating these inefficiencies and enhancing operational productivity. Tai TMS offers a comprehensive platform designed to revolutionize how you manage orders, ensuring timely responses, reducing errors, and improving overall customer satisfaction.
The Order Receiving Process with Tai TMS
When XYZ integrated Tai TMS into their workflow, Monday mornings became significantly less hectic. Tai saves XYZ considerable time opening emails and creating orders. It also helps them reduce errors, improve communication, and secure the best carriers promptly, leading to higher customer satisfaction and more won loads. Let’s see how it works.
Direct Shipment Creation
Tai’s TMS makes the order-receiving process seamless by automatically pulling order information from the customer’s inventory system and building a load directly in your TMS. Instead of your reps going back and forth with customers over email asking for the information they need to receive and quote a load, Tai integrates with their software systems to completely skip this step.
Order Status Updates
With random emails flying back and forth between your team and your customers, it can be impossible to keep track of every shipment. What happens when one of your reps gets sick or takes vacation? Does everything they’ve been working on stop moving forward? Do you have access to their email inbox or know where they left off entering incoming orders?
With Tai’s real-time task list, keeping everyone in the loop is a breeze. Your team is notified when orders come in and can quickly send back updates through the dashboard, ensuring everyone on your team and your customers knows what’s happening in real-time.
Email Order Processing
In addition, for those customers who don’t have an available integration, Tai handles email orders by scraping the details from incoming emails, using Natural Language Processing (NLP) to build the shipment record in the dashboard, and assigning a rep to respond using a customized email template. This makes email orders a hassle-free experience for everyone. Tai TMS achieves an automation rate of 97%, giving your team the time to personally address your customers’ unique requests and complexities.
Bulk Order Processing
When you need to process a large number of shipments, Tai has you covered with a bulk shipment importer, allowing you to enter hundreds of loads at once. Just import a CSV file of shipments into Tai TMS with one click. TAI creates each shipment and assigns a team member to process them. This feature speeds up order management and boosts your overall efficiency.
Manual Order Creation
If you must create an order manually, Tai’s Shipment Creation page will make it quick and easy with a customer address book that auto-populates origin and destination information, custom templates created for each specific customer, an easy way to duplicate recurring customers’ shipments, and quick access to important data like expected accessorial fees.
Built-in integration and Automation
Unlike other TMS systems that struggle with integration setup or come with high costs, Tai makes it super simple and affordable to integrate into your customer’s platforms, enabling your team to accept orders quickly. Tai also enables you to set up automations that speed up the quoting process. These automation include automatic notifications when orders are received and instant assignment of specific orders to certain team members.
In short, Tai TMS revolutionizes order receiving by addressing common inefficiencies and enhancing your team’s ability to deliver exceptional customer service and competitive margins. With Tai, your team can focus on revenue-building activities instead of getting bogged down in email.
The True Benefits of Tai TMS
Receiving orders is one of eight areas of improvement our experts recommend every freight broker evaluate and adjust for scale and profitability. Transitioning from email-based order management to Tai TMS can significantly transform your operations.
We designed Tai’s TMS to support optimization initiatives. Tai is a comprehensive digital platform that provides these critical benefits:
Through direct integrations with all major carriers and load boards, Tai allows you to go from receiving a quote to freight delivery quickly and without manual intervention. Tai empowers your team to focus on delivering extraordinary customer service and building profitable carrier relationships.
Ready To See How Tai TMS Can Help You Optimize Your Order Receiving Process? Request a Demo!
