AI-driven freight management
Applying AI to further embed efficiency and accuracy across the freight management lifecycle.
Client: Freight People
Freight People brings innovation, people and technology together to transform the way enterprise freight management is done. Operating across Australia and New Zealand, their freight management system – that can be fully integrated into existing ERP and warehousing solutions – allows organisations with large and diverse freight needs to simplify the management of multi-carrier freight operations.
Industry: Logistics and Freight Management
7%
Reduction in Customer Service Tickets
32%
Customer Service tickets preemptively resolved
46%
Reduction in first response time
32%
Reduction in Customer Service Staff Required
Opportunity
Given Freight People’s focus on continuous improvement through innovation, the team sought to further enhance the customer experience by applying smart AI capabilities to their freight management platform. They identified several areas particularly ripe for AI-driven innovation, including the real-time identification and resolution of issues and delivering more responsive customer service. And so, Cario Autopilot was born.
“Cario Autopilot has made it even easier for our team and our customers to manage and track their freight and get fast answers to their questions – thanks to improved data quality across the board. Ultimately, that improves the customer experience which is the number one outcome.”
Hoda el Katateny, National Customer Service Manager, Freight People
Outcomes:
Freight People is built on the market-leading Freight Management System, Cario, which has enabled these outcomes:
CONNOTE DETECTION – Optical character recognition (OCR) technology automatically extracts key data - such as sender and recipient information, shipment contents, tracking numbers, and delivery instructions - from consignment notes, eliminating repetitious and manual tasks.
AUTOMATED RESPONSES – Generative AI creates automated, human-like responses to customer inquiries and actions to speed up customer communication and improve operational responsiveness. It can not only reply to customers, but can chase up relevant suppliers for answers or documentation - resulting in more queries closed faster.
INQUIRIES & SERVICE REQUESTS - Advanced algorithms intelligently categorise inquiries, distinguishing between different types of tickets or requests, and efficiently route customer service tickets.
AUTONOMY – Customer inquiries are handled autonomously, retrieving the necessary data from the various source systems or, if complex, gathering information from various sources and automatically routing to Freight People’s customer service team for prompt resolution.
INTEGRATION - Integration with Freight People’s Hubspot customer support platform allows for seamless syncing of customer inquiries with relevant shipment data, providing a more cohesive user experience across both platforms.
PROACTIVITY – The system can now proactively detect and resolve potential delays by automatically initiating carrier queries and assigning internal service tickets.
SINGLE VIEW—When any carrier provides connote updates via email, Cario Autopilot will automatically detect the email, summarise the information in the email, and add it to the Freight Tracking Events page in Cario. This allows anyone querying a connote to see all this summarised event detail in context.
“We wanted to ramp up our platform’s capabilities and cement ourselves as market leaders in the Freight brokerage space. We achieved that by using Cario and, with a highly collaborative approach, could test ideas and fine-tune the AI capabilities that would benefit our customers the most.”
David Evans, CEO, Freight People
Future:
Freight People Autopilot has been successfully launched on the Freight People platform, and made available to existing customers at no extra cost. The technology has quickly demonstrated its capacity to proactively anticipate and resolve challenges, and as a result, Freight People has seen:
- substantial improvements in operational agility,
- a significant reduction in staff workload, and
- an enhanced customer experience overall.
After releasing the first version of Freight People Autopilot, our developers continue to add to and refine its features, always with the goal of boosting the platform’s performance. We are currently working on integrating with other large data sources that will allow us to predict network disruptions; ie. weather, flood and fire management databases. The other is the ability to predict the financial impact when there are freight profile changes, allowing us to mitigate the impact with different carriers.
This ongoing development is guided by feedback from our users and the changing needs of the logistics sector, ensuring that Freight People remains at the forefront of innovation in freight management technology.