Freight forwarding pricing can be really complex and dynamic, which makes it difficult to create quotes fast enough to improve customers experience. Nevertheless, industry experts have taken the initiative to digitize this process so that forwarders can meet modernity, be more competitive and give their sales a boost.
Nowadays, freight forwarders play a very important role in global economy. They are responsible for goods exchange between countries and continents. Also they have to put all of freight forwarding pricing from different service providers together to create a single quote and send it to their clients, the shippers.
At this century, living on a digital world that continues to evolve everyday, shippers expect to receive forwarders’ pricing quickly. However, quotes can actually take days or even weeks to be prepared and sent to the client.
Why? Because most of the times, freight forwarders have still very manual processes, where information about rates, schedules, etc., has to be looked for at different places and sources, plus it constantly changes. Therefore, they depend on a pricing specialist that keeps contact everyday with numerous providers across the world and supplies this data to create a quote.
The results of a test case with 40 freight forwarders say it all:
This shows how much it’s really necessary for freight forwarders to optimize their quotation process. The outcome is shippers having freight forwarding pricing information quickly, making forwarders more competitive at this new digital era and better at customer experience to boost their sales.
Quick data access: the key of freight forwarding pricing.
Making a quote on forwarders’ world, means having to manage a lot of data and turning it into one custom bid. So, the key to be competitive would rely on having access to all freight forwarding pricing information on real-time.
On this business rates structures are complex and dynamic, even on stable trade lanes (a 10 days old price is not reliable). Plus, data is usually fragmented which makes it even more complicated, especially for door-to-door shipments.
This only implies that for freight forwarding pricing to be functional, all data about rates, schedules and routes should be automated and found on a single source. In other words, forwarders should count on a software that helps them to digitize and optimize their processes to be able to create quotes faster and compete on modern world.
Taking freight forwarding pricing to another level.
To solve the main problem we created Cargofive, a smart, cloud-based platform that makes rate management easier and data access quicker, to create quotes in just a few minutes. Even door-to-door pricing can be found easily so these quotation process can be also optimized.
Our system automates rate management to help freight forwarders organize ocean, local and inland charges in one single place. This enables real-time updates to forwarders’ team, which produces more transparency and efficiency.
In addition, freight forwarding pricing optimization helps the forwarder to deliver faster, custom, high quality quotes to its clients, offering a better customer experience and a huge gain of time. The sales team can actually focus on closing more deals rather than preparing quotes, reducing costs and improving gain margin.
As we already said, data is the key of freight forwarding pricing and with automated processes a forwarder can stimulate growth. It is now the time to take it to the next level and to evolve with digitalization so that this industry can also be part of the new era. At Cargofive, we are willing to help!
