In the latest episode of Better Yet, Better Trucks’ fireside chat series that showcases innovators and visionaries in the parcel shipping space, host Dan Ptak sat down with Jorie Ramsaur, the VP of Strategic Accounts at Intelligent Audit, and Josh Fredman, SVP Operations at Better Trucks to talk about blind spots in the parcel industry and how shippers can add visibility to mitigate the negative impacts of them.

Josh made the point that tracking is a huge blind spot in the parcel space. 

“If you take an example of a shipment that's coming in from abroad, it may go through several different modes of transportation, as you mentioned. It may go through different carriers. It may go through different customs or brokerage points as well. I think that that's another blind spot. So I think that from a shipping standpoint or a shipper standpoint, having visibility into all of those activities is also really important,” said Josh.

“There's a lot of different opportunities and different providers out there, but you've got to really understand what is that right fit for you and for your customers,” said Jorie Ramsaur, adding, “The problem is if you're looking at data that's weeks, months old, you're making decisions on situations that may not be the case anymore."

In light of the talk about tracking and how it can help meet consumer expectations, Dan asked Josh and Jorie about how they’re working to manage consumer expectations when those expectations have escalated so much in the past few years. Where once customers were perfectly happy if you could simply deliver their package when you said you would, now they expect updates every step of the way.

“So whether that's through their API, whether that's accessing a customer portal that will enable them to make those changes, having not only that transparency and that real-time information but also the ability to make those changes,” said Josh.

“That end customer experience is really critical because it does impact their impression of your product. What does that end customer experience look like? I think to Josh's point, for the customer to be able to self-service and make decisions based off of what their needs are at that moment is really important,” said Jorie.

“The other area that we see for a lot of shippers is really being able to understand what are the factors that are impacting that experience. Being able to track different KPIs from point of order to the point of delivery helps the shipper to understand what issues are impacting that end customer experience. If the package is delayed to the customer, it could have been affected by the carrier, but the reality is that the warehouse may have been delayed in getting the shipment to the carrier in the first place,” added Jorie.

Dan dug into a point Jorie made about getting a look at the big picture, including upstream, to find efficiencies.

“I think there's a lot of low-hanging fruit like that by really being able to look at your data and understand what are those different situations that are occurring, how often are they happening. There could always be a potential of you have a low SKU that is only going to be held in one DC and that's fine, but if we're looking at it from a pretty consistent process where, "Hey, we've got a good bit of volume that is moving out of the wrong DC," that's cost and that affects all of those different aspects of the end customer experience. The time of transit's longer. You're having a higher cost of the carrier, all of those things,” Jorie said on looking at overall strategy to progress towards organizational goals.

Josh pointed out that Better Trucks sees a specific issue that creates delays, stating, “One of the biggest reasons for delay, I guess, is because of a flawed address or the need for better address verification. So we try to work with our clients upline to make sure that we're getting the right information.”

“We often see the same issue. You have an address that is continuously having to be changed by the carrier,” continued Jorie.

Dan noted that though technology seems like a great answer to a lot of the visibility issues shippers face, it comes with its own set of challenges. He asked the speakers what barriers they commonly see in trying to implement new technologies with their customers.

“From our vantage point, one of the things we see is just the adaptation of technology really based because of homegrown or archaic technology that they have and they're using onsite currently,” replied Josh.

Jorie agreed, adding, “The other thing I would say too is that in a lot of cases when you have data coming in from a variety of sources, many times it's very messy. So being able to have normalized data that's clean, more consistent, that can also be really beneficial, but overall, in a lot of cases, it's being able to really understand what are you looking to get out of the technology, what are you looking to improve and how does that impact the different strategies, and at the end of the day, the end customer experience and cost that you're looking to impact,” Jorie finished.

Dan then moved on to discuss the multi-carrier movement, asking Jorie how her company was advising clients in this area.

“There's a lot of benefits that customers can capture by using regional carriers and by having a multi-carrier strategy. Some of that depends on their product and what their strategy and approach is, but time and time again, we've seen that by differentiating and by having that multi-carrier strategy and being able to really understand what are you looking to gain from different carriers, where are their strengths, how are we using that to really be a part of that end customer experience, there's a lot to be gained from that,” she responded.

Dan went on to ask Josh what he’s seeing customers looking for in the multi-carrier space.

“I think one of the areas that some of these larger shippers, in particular, are most eager to exploit is the ability for us to be more dynamic and for us to be able to be more creative in our solutioning,” he responded. 

“I also see that the big carriers and the national carriers have been doing things the same way for decades. It's very tough for them to change. It's very tough for them to be more agile, and that's where I see opportunity for Better Trucks and other players in the market as well,” he added.

Dan finished out his questions by addressing the elephant in the parcel space room: strike threats at national carriers. He asked the speakers what they were seeing from customers in light of the uncertainty with the national carriers.

“We've seen issues come up in the past, whether that's during peak season or other times, where suddenly you need to be able to pivot. This is another case where you really need to understand what are your contingency plans and what needs to happen in order for you to enact those and really be able to keep your finger on the pulse of what's happening because, to your point, things could change very quickly,” Jorie answered.

Josh responded, “Some of the damage may already be done whereby shippers are already making changes. For us, that's been positive. I think that one of the things that we focused on is how can we build out our need for additional assets, should they be drivers, should they be buildings, should they be equipment. That's very similar to what we do for each peak season planning. So instead of planning for November, December, January time, we're planning for the summer.”

At the end of each episode of Better Yet, our host touches base with speakers on what they’re excited about in the parcel industry.

Josie started it off by answering, “So I think the use of technology and how carriers are using that to support that flexibility, like Josh talked about earlier, with being able to allow the end customer to self-service and be able to really make changes as they need, that's really exciting and exciting to see where we continue to evolve that.”

“I'm excited about helping utilize our assets in areas that we haven't previously because they've been needed either purely for parcel purposes or because the clients haven't needed or haven't been open to those discussions about helping them in other parts of their supply chain and product movement,” answered Josh.