Best logistics CRM for transportation businesses

Process optimization, efficiency, speed, and timing are all key metrics every logistics company is working towards to enhance business performance and boost sales. The emergence of new-age solutions and tools, such as CRM software for small businesses, is helping logistics service providers wade through heaps of unstructured data and generate patterns and insights that help improve business operations and sales performance.

The logistics industry and 3PL (third-party logistics) providers need access to tools that help track shipments right from a manufacturing facility to end-stage delivery. They also need tools to oversee processes, control costs, and reduce overheads.

What is a logistics CRM software?

A logistics customer relationship management (CRM) software helps businesses manage customer relationships, streamline operations, and optimize supply chain management within logistics companies. It centralizes customer data, tracks interactions, and facilitates efficient order and delivery management. 

Why do logistics companies need a CRM software?

With CRM software, logistics businesses can enhance customer service, improve operational efficiency, and drive business growth through better organization and informed decision-making.

A logistics CRM provides a deeper insight into your business operations and helps you improve the speed and efficiency of your sales team, optimize sales processes, shorten sales cycles, and enhance the quality of customer interactions.

Understanding customer needs, enabling proactive communications, and ensuring customer satisfaction are key factors that logistics companies worldwide are trying to achieve. Logistics service providers want to ensure shipments get delivered quicker, and operations are more streamlined, transparent, and cost-effective.

With the global transportation industry becoming highly competitive, effective customer data management, affordable pricing, timely delivery, and streamlined processes are essentials for enabling businesses to stay competitive. However, what really sets a logistics company apart is its ability to deliver quality service. Customer expectations take precedence today, and logistics businesses are focusing on customer engagement and building strong customer relationships to earn repeat business and customer loyalty.

To ensure customer satisfaction remains at the core of the business, leading logistics companies are leaning toward software solutions and adopting a modern logistics CRM software.

Why Freshsales is well-suited for a logistics business

Freshsales is a modern, AI-powered CRM that helps you track logistics operations, streamline processes, and seamlessly manage the customer lifecycle. Freddy AI provides actionable insights and next-best recommendations that help boost productivity across the value chain. 

• Easy-to-use: Freshsales is an intuitive and easy-to-use CRM system. With its simple UI and friendly onboarding, you can set up your logistics software, get started within hours, and see tangible results within weeks.

• Powered by AI: Freddy AI offers powerful capabilities that help you understand your customers and supply chain better. Leverage insights, predictions, and recommendations to streamline processes and make informed decisions. 

• Scalable: Freshsales is a feature-packed CRM that offers all the capabilities you need in a single solution to help you grow your logistics business. It scales and adapts to your changing business requirements and simplifies the tech stack as you grow.

How can logistics businesses benefit from Freshsales CRM?

1. Attract leads across multiple sources

Prospects and customers engage with a business across various channels. A CRM for logistics, like Freshsales, simplifies lead management and helps you easily capture leads from your website using chatbots.

• Deploy web forms and chatbots to engage visitors, collect contact information, answer queries, and convert them into leads that can be brought into your sales funnel.

• Engage with customers on their preferred channels of communication like email, phone, chat, or SMS, right from the CRM mobile application.

2. Get complete context with a 360-degree customer view

The CRM solution acts as a single source of truth for all your customer information. Freshsales enables sales teams to get a comprehensive view of customers and provides complete context to personalize engagement better.

• With Customer 360, get complete context of your leads and capture all interactions in one place. In addition to the information gathered by the salesperson, a logistics CRM software like Freshsales auto-enriches profiles by updating information from the lead’s social profiles and other publicly available information.

• Freshsales CRM provides a 360-degree view of interactions across channels, including emails, calls, and chat. You can also view upcoming appointments, tasks assigned, and notes taken on a single page.

• Freddy AI scores contacts based on behavioral and engagement factors to help sellers identify high-intent leads to pursue. Contact scoring surfaces high-converting leads, helps build a strong lead pipeline and improve sales efficiency.

3. Track sales processes with a visual pipeline

Freshsales helps you effortlessly track and manage various processes like sales, order fulfillment, and shipment tracking with a visual sales pipeline. You can also set up custom pipelines to track operations across business functions like inventory, packaging, and transportation.

• Simplify transportation management with multi-stage pipelines to track deal movement from sales to order fulfillment and shipment tracking. You can track potential customers from initial inquiry to deal closure, efficiently manage customer queries, and streamline the supply chain.

• Organize and track every stage of the logistics process using sales pipelines and oversee deal movement. Visualize orders by stages and drag and drop cards to track progress, spot roadblocks, and take quick action to ensure timely processing and delivery.

• Manage your pipeline in a list, table, or Kanban view and organize deals with custom views to surface data quickly, perform tasks, and easily track progress.

• Freddy AI highlights high-potential deals to commit for a quarter or month. With Freddy's deal insights, you can prioritize the right deals to boost win rates.

4. Boost productivity with intelligent automation

Freshsales offers advanced workflow capabilities, sales sequences, and auto-assignment rules to automate repetitive tasks, minimize manual effort, eliminate errors, and enhance productivity.

• A CRM for logistics saves you hours of manual work through task automation capabilities. You can streamline workflows by automating repetitive tasks like sending order updates or follow ups. Automated workflows ensure timely execution of tasks like tracking updates and triggering payment confirmation emails.

• With sales sequences, you can also automate personalized communications and improve customer engagement by keeping customers appraised with real-time updates via email, SMS, and calls.

• Auto assignment rules simplify lead routing and eliminate the need to allocate leads manually. You can automatically assign contacts, accounts, or territories to users or a group of users each time a record is created, imported, or updated.

5. Analyze performance and enable data-driven decision-making

With Freshsales, logistics businesses can create and share reports with ease to keep track of team and business performance. Stay on top of all your processes with real-time insights, whether it is the sales team’s performance, operations, or delivery. Identify bottlenecks, develop relevant strategies, and make data-driven decisions that help streamline operations, manage leads better, optimize the supply chain, and drive business growth.

• Track everyday metrics like orders fulfilled, number of deals closed by sellers, and regional business growth with built-in and custom dashboards.

• Generate custom reports using the CRM software without dev effort, review crucial metrics like leads generated, deal progress through stages, and revenue earned, and schedule reports to be shared with key stakeholders.

• Unearth crucial sales data to understand deal pipelines, sales cycles, and processes more extensively. Using these sales reports, you can track metrics in-depth and understand the overall company performance across various parameters including quota attainment.

6. Track progress in real-time with a mobile CRM

The Freshsales mobile app is a much-needed addition that enables teams to track progress anytime, anywhere. Sellers can add leads on the go, track deal progress, and engage with customers, all from their mobile devices.

• The Freshsales mobile app is designed to help logistics sales teams manage business on the go. Send emails, add tasks and appointments, take notes, make calls, track activities, and prioritize leads, from your mobile device.

• You can also easily manage contacts, deals, and accounts, instantly access documents, automatically log calls, associate them with relevant contacts, and send personalized SMSes in bulk or to individuals. With the app, sales teams can manage the supply chain, track processes, and fulfill orders right from their phones.

• Real-time push notifications ensure you don't miss meetings or upcoming tasks. Additionally, the app works offline so even in a poor network zone, you can access data and sync updates when you are back online.

7. Understand customer preferences and improve the overall experience

Understanding your customers and enabling a seamless experience goes beyond just structuring data and contact management. Sales and support teams must collaborate to ensure customer queries are resolved promptly. Timely support plays a crucial role in delivering superior customer experiences and growing your logistics business. With the Freshdesk - Freshsales integration, unify your helpdesk and ticketing software with your sales CRM to enable your sales and support teams to collaborate in real-time.

• The logistics CRM software gives sales and support teams access to communication history and up-to-date information about customers, their orders, payment confirmations, and shipment-related details.

• With the Freshdesk integration, you can ensure tickets are quickly assigned to suitable agents. Integrating your Logistics CRM with support software ensures that you can view tickets raised by each customer right in their profile so sales and support teams have compete customer context.

• Shared context and seamless collaboration give salespeople on-the-go visibility into customer feedback and critical customer support issues, preventing surprises and roadblocks.

Streamline processes and boost operational efficiency with Freshsales

Freshsales CRM empowers businesses in the logistics industry to streamline processes and grow revenue with capabilities that enhance productivity and collaboration through data-driven insights. Get end-to-end visibility into order fulfilment and shipment journeys, monitor progress, identify bottlenecks, reduce delays, and improve overall efficiency.