Salesforce for transportation & logistics industry: The importance & benefits

08 December 2022

In the digitally evolving world, customer expectations have changed drastically. Now, customers don’t just shop for products, they shop for superior and personalized experiences. The transportation and logistics industry has been taking a significant toll since the rapid expansion of the eCommerce industry, post 2019. The order volumes are at an all-time high with shrinking profit margins for the logistics industry. Customers want a real-time view into the entire supply chain process- from ordering, shipping, and tracking to fulfillment. So, how do you keep pace with the ever-increasing demand while delivering excellent customer experiences? The answer is Salesforce for transportation and logistics industry.

Salesforce CRM for transportation and logistics helps you automate processes, optimize sales and marketing, manage data, and analyze it for strategic business decisions, collaborate with teams, and improve customer service easily and efficiently. Salesforce for the transportation & logistics industry empowers professionals with a robust platform for proper supply chain management, hassle-free customer service, and easy business procedures. Salesforce can transform your B2B sales and provide a 360-view of customers to deliver customized experiences at scale.

Let’s look at how Salesforce for transportation & logistics solves challenges across organizations.

Introducing Salesforce for the transportation and logistics industry

As we move into an era where customer experiences matter more than product attributes and customer expectations evolve every minute, transportation and logistics companies will need to understand their customers deeper to provide tailored and timely experiences. The Salesforce CRM delivers seamless and personalized customer experiences by improving internal business processes. removing operational complexity, breaking down data silos, allowing every member of your team to gain a unified access into customer data, and empower shoppers to track order fulfillment from start to finish.

As a business leader, you can leverage the Salesforce Customer 360 platform by integrating it with your existing systems, migrate your legacy solutions to its SaaS-based cloud ecosystem, all in efforts to improve customer experiences. Salesforce CRM this industry along with its cutting-edge technology features enables easy client interaction, transparency in shipments, streamlined management across the supply chain, and more.

Along with the huge benefits, Salesforce for transportation and logistics mainly focuses on the following:

Automate and manage lead flow to increase revenue
Improve supply management, forecasting, and supply control
Deliver personalized and seamless customer experience
Onboard and train the workforce on the platform
Provide single customer view to entire teams across departments, leading to higher data-driven decision making

Challenges in logistics sector & how Salesforce CRM helps

	Challenge	How Salesforce Helps
Tedious manual processes	The transportation and logistics industry still relies on legacy models and traditional sales practices generating beyond-management paperwork, which is difficult to keep a track of, resulting in inefficient customer support experiences. In the long run, this impacts customer retention numbers.	Salesforce CRM digitizes operational processes to eliminate manual tasks and provide transparency across departments. It helps in replacing paper-based documentation and ensures smooth shipping experiences for customers. You can even explore insights around cost metrics to figure out fake orders and errors in transit which lets you deliver goods on time.
Absence of fleet management in logistics	For an enhanced delivery experience, managers must be able to track the route, monitor the vehicles, volume of goods and idle time. With the traditional approach in logistics organizations are unable to gather information correctly. Hence, in the era of quick delivery some brands are incapable of managing the fleet.	With the help of Salesforce CRM, you can create real-time visibility into fleet management, shipment location, and status. You can create interactive reports, dashboards, and visualizations to gain real-time insights around logistics route, current fleet, and expected deliveries, supporting management in decision-making. Salesforce even empowers you with AI-driven predictive analytics via Einstein AI to forecast trends and customer demands and stay on top of it.
Supply chain disruption	Supply chains are riddled with complexities around demand surge, geographical conditions, traffic, delay in shipments, and so on. As some of these aspects are beyond any control, logistics and transportation service providers find it hard to manage deadlines, complicating the process further. Overcoming this situation is often challenging for logistics and transportation companies.	Salesforce CRM for transportation and logistics deploy fleet management solutions to map data such as GPS location, current weather, speed of vehicle, fuel level, or safety of goods. These insights help in estimating the time duration for delivery of goods and real-time location of the fleets.
Personalization at scale	To create an impact in customers' minds, a brand is always looking for tailored solutions for customers. For the logistics industry creating a smooth shipping experience across every touchpoint builds strong customer trust. But delivering personalization at scale can be challenging.	Salesforce CRM allows us to integrate data and handle logistics issues perfectly. With customer feedback, businesses can improve customer relationships and engagement at scale.
Time management	With the boom in eCommerce businesses worldwide, time management seems challenging for the shipping and logistics sector. Customers don’t want to deal with brands who deliver late or provide an unsatisfactory experience.	Salesforce CRM can assist you in managing records through a single dashboard. It ensures keeping track of lead timelines. Moreover, implementing Salesforce Service Cloud assists in providing the right customer service experience as agents leverage a unified view of customer data including their previous conversations with agents, and then provide the right solution. Agents can even automate call forwarding to appoint it to the right available agent for speedy case resolution.

How is Salesforce CRM beneficial for the transportation and logistics industry?

Salesforce CRM helps companies in gaining a competitive advantage by helping them drive customer experience and loyalty. Its entire suite of innovative Cloud solutions are targeted towards connecting your shipping experience from start to finish.

Salesforce delivers intelligent services in real-time at every stage of customer interaction. It keeps customers engaged with automated quotes, tracking, customization and managed lead flow for seamless experience at scale.
Salesforce gives a 360-degree approach to compete better, meet customer expectations via feedback and suggestions, and automate your supply chain network for efficient operations.
Salesforce’s AI functionality allows quick data analysis to gain deeper insights around agent productivity, attrition and satisfaction of their employees.

Here is how Salesforce CRM drives transformation of the transportation and logistics industry. The implementation of Salesforce CRM drives digital transformation of the transport and logistics industry. With its highly relevant solutions Salesforce offers ample of benefits some of them are:

#1. Empower employees with digital tools: Many companies have remote workforces and often face struggle to keep the department aligned. To keep the workforce productive, Salesforce provides companies digital support capabilities, collaboration tools, and employee support communities from where you can create effective employee onboarding and training programs. This keeps employees effective, connected, and satisfied.

#2. Digitize business processes: Transportation and logistics traditionally relied on paper or spreadsheets resulting in tedious and time-consuming manual handling of operations. Salesforce CRM is a powerful and flexible digital platform that allows companies to automate and streamline business processes. With Salesforce, you can digitize legacy processes involving tons of paperwork with digital records for easy access. This allows them to organize and access their entire business data on a single platform with real-time transparency in shipping journeys at scale.

#3. Connect with ecosystem partners: Since most of the transport and logistics companies are part of complex supply chain networks and must collaborate, Salesforce allows you to automate and consolidate partner information in one place, onboard more partners easily, and maximize revenue. This increases transport capacity and relaxes network bottlenecks by providing API-led system integration solutions and digital collaboration solutions.

#4. Omni-channel service: In the recent digital era, shippers and consignees both need seamless experience and transparency in status of shipping when dealing with order shipments. Both B2B and B2C companies must build uniform supply chains that can be easily scaled up and down as per the current demand. Salesforce helps consolidate all customer information and interactions in a single place to support agents with real-time updates for effective customer service solutions.

The full-suite Salesforce Cloud ecosystem for transportation and logistics operations

Salesforce for transportation and logistics is a popular implementation as it simplifies complex business processes. With Salesforce platforms like Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Mulesoft Anytime Platform, enterprises can become more responsive, agile, and resilient. The best part- the Salesforce ecosystem makes it easy for logistics and transportation industry to transform their operations, meet customer demands at scale, and improve shipping experiences and efficiency. Salesforce Clouds is making companies more responsive, agile and resilient by optimizing product flow, reducing delays, and meeting the demands. So here are some of the Salesforce solutions that the transportation and logistics industry can implement to improve internal processes, improve order fulfillment, and offer superior experiences.

Salesforce Sales Cloud: Sales Cloud has powerful capabilities that can skill up your sales representatives to close deals faster. It can also help in assisting businesses in converting quotes into actual orders and create accurate funnels. Implementing Sales Cloud in transport & logistics can help to boost sales and increase ROIs.

Salesforce Service Cloud: With a holistic 360-degree view of your customers, you can utilize Salesforce Service Cloud to deliver superior customer services, implement self-service portals, create real-time service dashboards, stay proactive, and assist with easy product returns. Salesforce Service Cloud empowers customer service teams with the tools and information that improves service experiences. When they contact you for help, agents can route them to the right agent, or glance previous transcripts to service them better.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Salesforce Marketing Cloud streamlines the online marketing campaign management process. It enables logistics companies to deliver customized campaigns to deliver personalized messages to every customer across the most preferred channels for effective marketing. Salesforce Marketing Cloud in transportation and logistics is how you can attract, recruit and retain more customers and drive sales.

Salesforce Customer 360: Salesforce Customer 360 can help transportation companies to connect data across the ecosystem to enable better collaboration, communication, and data-driven decision making. Customer 360 can unite your teams to accurately manage supply chains, forecast demands and offer connected experiences.

Mulesoft Anypoint platform: For transportation and logistics Mulesoft Anypoint platform seamlessly integrates data and systems both inside and outside of Salesforce, unifying all the partners across on a single dashboard. Mulesoft facilitates connectivity between partners and logistics firms by providing you with business insights all in a single-view dashboard simplifying tasks to deliver customer experiences.

Salesforce CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote): Salesforce CPQ implementation in this industry eases the complex pricing tariffs as per the delivery location. This eliminates manual processes and saves time which can now be spent on driving conversion rates.

Salesforce Einstein AI: Salesforce Einstein AI provides predictive analytics and machine learning tools for the transportation and logistics sector to draw useful insights. It keeps sales representatives informed across every touchpoint.

Partner with us to implement Salesforce in transportation and logistics

Salesforce for transportation and logistics results in a resilient supply chain, enable transparency across departments, network with partners and connect them on a single dashboard, simplify complicated operations, and ultimately offer better shipping experiences. As a Salesforce partner, we understand your concerns around legacy modernization, digital transformation and superior customer experiences. Our Salesforce CRM for transportation and logistics implementation experts assist in enhancing business and boost your ability to manage processes systematically and increasing profits.