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Industry spotlight: Transport & logistics

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Lachlan Hessing

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4 Oct 2018
3 min read
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Transport & logistics firms face two overarching challenges: maximizing operational efficiency, and adding value to the customer experience.

Maximizing operational efficiency depends on utilising high-cost assets, while reducing bottlenecks and idle time. The process of organising, coordinating and executing asset and goods movement - across the business – pulls resources from field operations, maintenance, IT, and other supply chain partners.

Adding value to the customer experience can be hard in such a competitive industry. Responding to customer expectations for parcel tracking, flexibility, and even same-day delivery requires detailed knowledge of both their needs as a business or end consumer, and the capabilities of your current supply chain to deliver on these expectations.

Customer engagement – flexibility and convenience

Increase flexibility and convenience for your customers by notifying them of deliveries ahead of time, and offering them pickup options for time and location if they can’t be home to receive their delivery. Not only does this boost customer satisfaction, it also allows you to spread out demand and avoid bottlenecks. Integrated communications also empowers your customers to submit feedback in the moment, giving you an instant view of their perceptions, and interaction with your services.

Internal communications – executing faster and better, every day

By planning deliveries and vehicle usage, the business can make sure the right resources are in the right place, matching needs across different areas. Even for disruptions outside of a firm’s control – for example, a late-running passenger train holding up freight deliveries, or a fogged-in airport causing flow-on delays in moving goods – awareness can be markedly increased, and impact can be decreased, through coordinated action, all facilitated through one central communications hub.

Business resilience – incident management, and automated alerts

Many business assets are constantly on the move in the transport & logistics sectors, and are therefore exposed to higher risks and management difficulties in the event of an emergency. This makes incident management potentially more complex than for other industries. If an asset or delivery is compromised, stakeholders need to be informed ASAP. To maintain this fast alerting capability, the infrastructure supporting people and vehicles out in the field needs to be operational 24/7, and integrated, software-as-a-service communications solutions are independent of local IT infrastructure, meaning that alerts can still be sent out if business systems are down.

Integrated communications in practice

Field vehicles and equipment, especially high-value assets, are often fitted with telematics systems to log their movements and condition. Combined with messaging from Whispir, telematics technology can have the same instant alert capabilities as an internal IT system – as soon as an asset malfunctions, goes outside predefined limits, or is involved in an accident, alert messages can be sent out with the precise location coordinates and incident details to crisis teams, for quick response.

If team members are unavailable, or don’t acknowledge the message, alerts can be automatically escalated to higher-level personnel to ensure incident information reaches the right people, at the right time, for swift action.

Managing communications with Whispir helps your business deliver, better.

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