Transportation companies don’t just face literal roadblocks on the road, but also internally within their operations. Fortunately, Salesforce has often stepped in to clear up some traffic so they can keep driving, sailing, or flying smoothly by keeping track of several moving pieces (no pun intended).
Large transportation companies whose trucks you may know like Maersk have used Salesforce to integrate their sales, customer service, and marketing departments while Einstein provides data on their performance. Salesforce for transportation companies often take the form of implementations aimed at improving coordinated communication and mitigating vehicle delays, resulting in more satisfied and safer customers.
To break it down, here are some ways tailored Salesforce implementations have eased common pain points in transportation companies:
- More efficient, centralized shipment and vehicle location tracking
Transportation companies should be responsible for monitoring where all their shipments are at any part of the journey, for themselves and for their customers. Salesforce can be configured to track wherever your shipments are in the world with a 360 degree view of the shipper and any adverse conditions your shipments are experiencing in Sales Cloud. Your agents can communicate with shippers through customized portals you can build on Salesforce.
Delays and shipments can throw off the supply chain and customer satisfaction, so Service Cloud can proactively notify you when there’s a change in the status of your shipment while Einstein can recommend products and shipment services such as humidity monitoring. With this data, you can alert your customers to potential delays before they happen.
- Monitoring shipment conditions
No one likes the frustration of waiting weeks for a package only for it to arrive damaged. Sometimes this happens because of shipping conditions, such as weather or road conditions. For example, the Port of Rotterdam built an app on Salesforce that tracks key shipment information, including the water depth of where its ships are located. Understanding the conditions of shipments, including regulations they’ll have to pass through, helped their staff figure out how to ensure cargo would arrive on time or forecast delays. AI helped with this by calculating typical times a certain step would take, such as completing a port call.
- Handling delays and customer complaints with grace
Depending on its cargo, just one change in a ship’s schedule can mean delays for a hundred businesses. Just an hour delay for a commercial flight could leave passengers stranded for several more hours if they can’t make a connecting flight. The airline KLM used Salesforce to track its exploding volume of customer support cases, classify which ones were more urgent, and reroute cases to the properly experienced staff. These efforts noticeably shrank the time spent on resolving each case. Japan Airlines also experienced more efficient customer service by using Chatter, enabling different departments to communicate and collaborate with one another for more company-wide support.
With the ability to forecast delays powered by data, proper communication, and AI, a transportation company can rearrange its schedule, alert customers, and redeploy resources to prevent further issues.
- Improving employee physical safety
There are always physical risks with transportation, but many of these can be mitigated by proper communication and taking the right protocols. Facilitating more efficient intra-departmental communication and monitoring vehicle and shipment conditions and locations, as mentioned above, are important to maintaining the safety of every human being and object being transported.
Additionally, Salesforce is designed to be accessible from anywhere, at any time, using any device. This allows transportation companies to access customer information and manage operations on the go, which is essential in an industry where employees are often on the road or working from remote locations. This means a driver or ship captain doesn’t need to run to a computer to notify the company they’ve hit an iceberg.
5. Integrating with other systems that handle other parts of the transportation and logistics processes:
Salesforce integrates with a wide range of other systems, including transportation management, accounting and finance, and logistics. This allows transportation companies to create a seamless end-to-end process and eliminate the need for manual data entry and reconciliation. These integrations helped logistics company GWC unify their sales and service operations.
An experienced Salesforce partner can help you facilitate these integrations, such as helping with data cleaning, migrating, and mapping it to the right fields in your new software.
There are many ways Salesforce can be implemented and customized to help your company grow new wings and get your wheels rolling sooner, cohesively and safely of course. Since transportation companies are involved in experiences other industries often aren’t, having a team member with years of experience with Salesforce consulting in such an environment can help you unlock solutions you may not have explored yourself. For example, they may be able to explain why you’re experiencing the problems you are and point out literal and metaphorical roadblocks you might encounter in the future that you haven’t experienced yet.
That’s why here at SM Innovations, we work with industry-specific subject matter experts on each project. If you’re an airline, we’ll have you working alongside a Salesforce consultant with years of experience implementing and maintaining Salesforce for multiple airlines. With such specific expertise onboard, you’re more likely to be prepared for your industry’s unique challenges such as its legal regulations and user journeys.
(If you’re in hospitality, check out our Salesforce accelerators for that here! If you’re in financial services, we’ve got you covered as well.)
Think your business could use anything above? Let’s connect you with one of our transportation consultants.
Discover new ways to use Salesforce for transportation that’ll help solve your business challenges and have you sailing new seas.
