Helpful Articles
Meeting customer's expectations with a TMS
Top Tips for Hauliers: How technology can help you meet customer needs.
‘Amazon-style’ deliveries have set the bar high with easy on-line ordering, and constant updates during and after delivery. Hauliers are under increasing pressure to provide a similar consumer-like experience, with more convenience and greater transparency.
Fortunately, a TMS can help haulage operators meet customer needs in a variety of ways:
1. Give customers convenient ways to work with you
- Customers can place orders easily using your own branded portal. Online bookings are a great way for your customers to serve themselves when it’s convenient for them. Bookings appear in your TMS automatically, avoiding time-consuming manual job input.
- Transfer orders automatically from your customer’s system, into your own TMS. Use a Transport Management System (TMS) that can integrate with your customer’s system to bring orders into the TMS.
- Automatically price work, ready to plan using automatic rate schedules.
2. Meet customer needs, as you plan
- Plan work around customers’ individual requirements such as timed deliveries, ensuring goods are delivered when they expect.
- Give planners all the information they need about customers to ensure their needs are met. Use a TMS that records everything about your customers such as notes about accessing tricky sites and delivery instructions, ensuring all their needs are considered and met during the planning process. With your traffic planners informed, they can ensure you provide the best service you can, to your customers.
3. Keep customers informed
- Provide regular updates to customers as their jobs are in progress. Notifications can be sent by email, or progress viewed online using a web portal, or track and trace app.
- Update customers with non-conformance details as soon as possible, to keep them informed, and aware of any issues, and changes to their jobs.
- You can’t argue with a photograph! Provide proof photos of delivered goods or any non-conformed jobs.
4. Improve transparency for your team
- Enable drivers to record details at the point of collection or delivery, using an ePOD app. Any specific details your customers need about the job, can be saved to the app and provided to the customer including signature, timestamp and any other information you ask drivers to record.
- Give your traffic planning team real-time visibility of job progress, to manage exceptions proactively and keep them informed as issues arise.
- Drivers can amend job details at the point of collection or delivery, ensuring accurate details such as weights and quantities are fed back to admin, and job details changed and invoiced accurately.
5. Give customers peace of mind their goods are in safe hands
- Provide regular KPI reports to show the value your company is providing, and how you are performing against targets. Automatically send reports from your TMS, to ensure reports arrive at the same point in time.
Would you like to learn more about a TMS and how it can support your customers?
Talk to our team on 0191 250 2220 or email: hello@mandata.co.uk.
Now we can give our customers the freedom to access and interact with real-time information when they log into the Mandata system. Our directors and staff can access our systems remotely. None of this was possible before.
Mandata’s products have helped us to reduce numerous duplications of administration within our transport office. They’ve also reduced the risk for error, and they’ve generally improved the communication with both our drivers and our customers.
Proof of delivery is digital, time-stamped and with the GPS location, which all makes answering customer queries much quicker.