Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: You're listening to the Zipline Logistics Truck. Yeah. Podcast where we explore all kinds of hot topics in the logistics industry.
Get ready to learn, laugh, and get your freight on.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another edition of the Zipline Logistics Podcast. My name is Jesse Jewett. Join with me at, as always, our director of training and development, Teddy Lee Knox. Teddy, good morning.
[00:00:35] Speaker B: Hello. How are you?
[00:00:37] Speaker A: Wonderful. We are talking about customer service in logistics, something that is very near and dear to my heart. I know it's near and dear to yours, having worked here for a dozen years now over both of us. Yeah, yeah.
[00:00:51] Speaker B: 13.
[00:00:51] Speaker A: You're 13 officially coming up on 13. Yeah, yeah.
[00:00:54] Speaker B: And you're like right behind me.
[00:00:55] Speaker A: Yeah. I was 12 in June.
[00:00:57] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:00:57] Speaker A: So a little bit past that. But customer service is one of the things that got me into logistics. It's one of the things that I value the most.
We certainly talk about it all the time on several of our other podcast episodes. It speaks volumes here at Zipline Logistics on what we do on a day to day basis, but we're going to dive in. It deserves its own episode.
[00:01:18] Speaker B: Yes, it does. Several, honestly.
[00:01:21] Speaker A: Several episodes, man. This is a multi part series on customer service and logistics.
[00:01:26] Speaker B: I think this is going to be everyone's favorite episode episode.
[00:01:28] Speaker A: Let's talk about what you think good customer service or high end customer service looks like in logistics.
[00:01:34] Speaker B: In logistics, I think, I think it's actually kind of hard to say that because I don't think that this is something that people put with logistics. They don't think logistics and customer service. When people think about customer service, they think of, you know, I don't know, like I feel like shopping or something. That's not logistics because as an intangible service, they're expecting, you know, like updates and delivery. They're not expecting communication necessarily. It's something that everybody needs. But I don't think that people would put those two things together. So I think that that's a lot harder for people to say, what's customer service? Or what makes up customer service and logistics? Which is why we're here to explain it.
[00:02:13] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:02:13] Speaker B: So I think the biggest thing is honesty. I think that's really important, especially when you're wanting something to be delivered.
[00:02:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:02:20] Speaker B: I'm a decently big online shopper.
[00:02:22] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:02:23] Speaker B: When I don't know when something's going to be here, that's a problem.
[00:02:26] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:02:27] Speaker B: Especially when it has to do with, you know, like getting things ready for my kids. If I need something to arrive by a certain time, I Don't have that, you know, honesty of when it's actually going to get here, who that carrier is. It can cause a lot of problems.
[00:02:37] Speaker A: I mean, back to school, shopping.
[00:02:40] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:02:40] Speaker A: Quick tangent. Are you excited about being back to school?
[00:02:43] Speaker B: Mixed feelings. A little bit of both.
[00:02:45] Speaker A: The correct answer is 100% yes. Get them out of the house. Get them to school five days a week. Come on. Pivoting back to customer service. You mentioned honesty, transparency. Right. So like, you know, showing exactly where the truck is. I think to me when I hear honesty and transparency is, you know, coming up with solution. Hey, this was supposed to pick up today. We're ahead of the game. Something happened. We need to pivot. Right. I think that's really, really important. That goes to our next item. Timely updates. Right. Part of that honesty is kind of constant communication.
Very thorough, you know, knowing exactly what's happening with the trucks or for our customers sakes, orders every second of every
[00:03:26] Speaker B: day and being able to find it easily. There's nothing more frustrating than having to like, I don't know, look through 75 emails or search very specific keywords to find it. It's nice just to be able to click on something or go somewhere and find what's going on.
[00:03:39] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:03:40] Speaker B: There's nothing more frustrating to me than not being able to figure that out because none of us have a ton of time just to search for things. We just need it there.
[00:03:46] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:03:47] Speaker B: I'm a very impatient human though, so I don't want to wait.
[00:03:50] Speaker A: That probably helps in your customer service of logistics. Let's get it going and moving it quickly.
One other thing that I, that we mentioned, I think, I don't know if this technically falls into customer service, but we're going to talk about it. Delivering on commitments.
[00:04:05] Speaker B: I think that definitely does. Yeah, that falls in. I think that's one of the, I guess maybe most misunderstood ones is if you say you're going to follow up for updates or issue happens or you're going to follow up on if we can actually get that delivery point before the transit even starts. Those things are really big to me.
[00:04:24] Speaker A: Yeah. Following through it makes sense. We're going to pick this up on Wednesday at 2pm, deliver Thursday at 8am
[00:04:31] Speaker B: I think with that though, it goes into the logisticizing that we talk about so often and you need to be looking at the stuff before anything happens. So the second you get that order, you know, right away, I do not have enough time to get the appointment that you requested.
[00:04:44] Speaker A: Right.
[00:04:44] Speaker B: Or I know that this carrier is not going to work because it's LTL and this receiver is difficult.
So being able to do those things in advance I think is a big deal. And that I've seen us do on the floor and I've seen customers come to us asking for because they haven't gotten other places.
[00:04:59] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:04:59] Speaker B: And I think that's good. Still goes into delivering on commitments.
[00:05:02] Speaker A: Yeah. A really good way to kind of capture our next item. Educating your customers and any other partners about best practices. Right. Hey, here's this one skid shipment.
It's 1200 miles away. We need to deliver it tomorrow. Boom, right away. That's not going to happen. Right. Unless we pay significantly amount more money or hey, here's a last minute shipment etc. Etc. These are the, this is how we want it to go. We want this, these six stops to deliver together. Okay. Well if Your target is $50 a skid, that's not going to work. Right?
[00:05:36] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:05:37] Speaker A: So being able to have those types of discussions. You know, we use our proprietary intelligence software Canopy to dive into some of the, the analytics portion. We can tell people, hey, a two day point from Southern California is cheaper to ship on Monday, Wednesday or Friday than it is on Tuesday and Thursday due to appointments, due to carrier preferences, due to just general capacity out in the marketplace. That goes a long way on again improving the lives of our transportational professional partners. And it's part of customer service, right?
[00:06:12] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:06:12] Speaker A: You know, they may not know that.
[00:06:14] Speaker B: I love how you added into specific KPIs. I think that's really important to go with this as well as you can't just educate them on what's going on. You need to educate it in a way that they can understand.
So their preferred cost per piece or cost per pallet. That needs to go into that so they understand why we're not going to be delivering, you know, this next day this one pallet or the options and which one they should choose, which may seem more expensive in the long run but will help them on charges later.
[00:06:40] Speaker A: It's a great call out and transitions into our next item. It's almost like you're doing this on purpose but viewing your customers transportation goals as your own and treating it, treating them as an extension of your business. Right. This is not. We talk a lot. It's one of our values. But partnership, this is we, we do not want to or we will be just a rate in a truck. For some customers we prefer to be a long term partner. I like to use the phrase it's not just for the next Five months for the next five years plus hopefully yes, with our customers.
So understanding or asking those difficult questions ahead of time, what would be best for you? What are you trying to accomplish here? You know, it's very easy to say we want the cheapest rate possible. Well, it's a little bit more than that when you're dealing with some of those. Our top five retailers, Costco, Walmart, UNFI, Kiki, Kroger, etc. You know, there are certain metrics that you need to hit.
Definitely our customers have those goals and have those in mind. What can we do to help them achieve those goals?
[00:07:43] Speaker B: Absolutely.
I think that it helps too to have, just to have those goals. So when I go in, I know exactly what I should be doing on this account. I like having almost like something to work backwards from to get to that end goal of that cost per piece or that on time delivery percentage. And not having that makes it really difficult. Also it makes it really difficult to problem solve if you don't have those things.
[00:08:06] Speaker A: Absolutely. I like the thinking about goals and kind of partnership with customers is that, you know, maybe the VP of supply chain or the CFO or etc may have a different goal than the person who's delivering us or tendering us the freight on a daily basis. Right. So at the highest level it's cost per case or reduction in, in transportation spend overall or year over year, et cetera, et cetera.
And maybe the CEO says mad ma B d percentage deliveries into Walmart. Those are specific goals. The person who's tendering us is freight. I don't want to get called on the phone.
[00:08:42] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:08:42] Speaker A: So email me, give me an update, give me a canopy login. You know, these are my goals. My goal is not get disrupted on a daily basis by late drivers. Just do this, this and this. And you know, it's really important kind of having that connectivity across the whole organization to make sure that we're delivering on those promises.
[00:09:01] Speaker B: Absolutely. I think that's what's so cool about this, the evolution of technology in this industry too. And I like how we've done it where we obviously still having that personal touch, otherwise we wouldn't be here. That human element along with the technology is it allows us to do multiple things for multiple people at once. So we can take care of the CSR and make sure that they're not getting the phone calls and they're not getting responses. But then we can keep those KPIs so we can deliver on like basically all five things of all five levels of a company or however many there. I don't know why I chose five. I think because you said five years. Sure, we're going to go with that.
[00:09:36] Speaker A: Five is a magic number. I think it's three, but we're going to run with it. We talked about logisticizing as well, but proactive solutions. When problem arise, we, when problems arise, we know that the world of logistics can be messy at times. It's important to take that in, come up with a solution and then present those solutions. I like to say presenting options. Right here's, hey, that, that one skid that is 1200 miles away, that's due tomorrow. Here are the three options. We can expedite it, ship it on a plane for $6,000. We can ship it with a, a straight truck for $3,000. We can ship it on a regular LTL. It's going to deliver late for 300.
So what's that phrase like fast, cheap, safe or something? Pick two, you know, you know what I'm talking about. I think, you know, I don't know, we get better, faster, cheaper, something like that. Pick two of them. That's, that's what you're gonna, that's what you're gonna get. So, you know, providing those solutions or those options to our customers I think goes a long way. And again, walking them through those options I think is super important.
[00:10:43] Speaker B: I think so. I'm always so actually excited and surprised by the fact that we're never surprised about issues that come up. I feel like we, we know these retailers and these warehouses so well that when it happens it just immediately goes to, okay, here's the three options. Let's see what they want to do.
And based off of those options, we have the next plan and then we have a next plan after that because you never know, right?
[00:11:06] Speaker A: Things happen. Things happen internally. Rewarding accountability.
This is a fun one. We talk about operators of the month, brokers of the month here at Zipline. So these are people who are consistently going above and beyond. I think it's, it's kind of an indirect way to affect customer service. But we are rewarding people who are doing the things that we talk about on a day to day, excessively above 100% or if you will. And it's really important that we're, we're identifying those folks internally so that we continue to see that positive behavior. It's a challenge, right? It's a challenge on a day to day basis when you know, you get another last minute order or you get another truck breakdown or you see Six pos that you think can, can work together on a consolidation, but you get a wrong delivery appointment. So now you have to pivot and come up with a different solution. You know, those are sometimes can take a lot of bandwidth in your brain. It can take a lot of bandwidth in your heart emotionally and be frustrated. But people who are willing to kind of wade through those, the muddy waters of the world of logistics, it's important
[00:12:16] Speaker B: to recognize them, motivating them to jump into new challenges. You see it on the floor, I see people getting competitive. When that OA email comes out or broker of the month comes out, everyone's so excited to click on that email.
[00:12:29] Speaker A: Part of that internal rewards.
You know, we do have tools we do internally that help people advance those solutions for our customers. So that's continuous improvement opportunities through technology and analysis of data. We mentioned Canopy, our proprietary intelligence software. It's got the basics and the, the basics quote unquote of like the Summit, which is our track and trace functionality that provides visibility to our customers. But then it's got a whole section of data analytics. Right. And so we're meeting with our customers sometimes weekly, mostly monthly or quarterly to kind of discuss those analytics again, discuss the metrics, the goals that we talked about. We have performed network analysis for some customers. Say hey, we, we have a warehouse in the Midwest, but we're, most of our orders are on the west coast. We, we want to figure out where the next warehouse is going to be.
Can you help us do an analysis of that? Et cetera, et cetera.
So using that technology to our advantage to help provide long term solutions for our customers is pretty, pretty impressive and it's been a real feather in our cap over the last five years. Teddy.
[00:13:41] Speaker B: Yes it has. And I know this isn't exactly where we're going with this, but Shameless Plug Zipline University has a lot of data as well and I think that ties in directly to customer service. We do so many things that are really role specific, in essence on how to handle situations, how to even negotiate. And I think that that's really important when it comes to this is because people have the availability to continue to grow and develop through hopefully what they find as fun educational experiences. But I think that that's really important too. You can't just learn about the market. You've got to be able to do all different aspects of this job in roles that have nothing to do with logistics. Because our customers are not doing the logistics, they're relying on us for that. You got to be able to talk to them in, in their language.
[00:14:25] Speaker A: Yeah, we got to let them focus on what they're good at. Making snack foods or beverages that are tasty and sometimes healthy. How about that?
[00:14:34] Speaker B: How about that?
[00:14:35] Speaker A: So why does this all matter, Teddy? Why not just try and find the cheapest truck out there or the cheapest carrier that's, you know, going to drive your costs down theoretically.
[00:14:46] Speaker B: Well, first of all, that's just not Zipline. So that just wouldn't, it wouldn't make sense. That's not who we are. That's not who I've seen zipline be in the last 13 years.
And I think that that's why it works is because you are getting to a partnership level and you're actually able to make change and see that change happen fast. If you're just doing the rate in the truck, you don't have a goal, you're just running and then all of a sudden you're going to find yourself in the middle of nowhere with no path. So the rate in the truck is a, is a short term and long term, I guess like distraction from an actual goal to get somewhere where the company is continuing to grow. Like the company we're working with our customer, but then also zipline growing so we can continue to get that technology and that data out there to help customers in other ways. There's no progress.
[00:15:32] Speaker A: I think it's important, you know, you talk about long term partnership or sustainability. I've definitely worked with customers who chase the bottom dollar and you know, we've certainly identified where we play with those customers.
[00:15:48] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:15:49] Speaker A: In general, even if they are chasing the bottom rates, if something, I found that if something pops up that's urgent or critical or super important, et cetera, et cetera, they usually call us. That makes me feel good. That makes me feel like, okay, maybe on a day to day basis they're not kind of quote unquote, buying what we're selling. But overall they know that if they need transparency, honesty, updates, et cetera, they're coming to zipline, which feels good. Why does it matter? I think as we've kind of discussed on several of these podcast episodes, the world of logistics can be a driver of profitability for our customers. That on time delivery those mabd adherence to your customers gets your product on the shelf, can drive sales, can remove fines from those big retailers who have, you know, fines built in. If you don't adhere to those MA B metrics, which keeps cash in your pocket. That's a good thing.
[00:16:53] Speaker B: That is a good thing.
[00:16:53] Speaker A: So that's why it matters to me.
Well, I mean all of it. And certainly it matters because for at Zipline, I want to come to a place that values that, that values the connectivity and values the partnership with our customers. Because I think that makes coming to work much better. And I think that's why. One of the reasons why our customer service is high across the board. We've got metrics. There's something called a Net Promoter score, Teddy, have you ever heard of that?
[00:17:21] Speaker B: Yes, I have.
[00:17:21] Speaker A: Nps. For those who are in the know, it's a metric that measures customer loyalty and satisfaction.
It's calculated by asking customers how likely they are to recommend a product or company to a friend or colleague. On a scale of 0 to 10. Zipline score, do you know our score?
[00:17:39] Speaker B: Yeah. 74.
[00:17:40] Speaker A: Oh, boom. Duh. The 3 PL industry average is 13.
[00:17:45] Speaker B: But the net promoter score goes in the negative one hundreds as well. There are companies out there that are in the negative numbers when it comes to this. And so yes, 13 and 74 are a big difference, but there's ones that are even lower.
[00:17:59] Speaker A: Yeah, that's crazy. That's crazy. And something that we, we definitely hang our hat on.
[00:18:05] Speaker B: Agree.
[00:18:06] Speaker A: So we mentioned Canopy, we mentioned our CPG and retail expertise and I think we mentioned, you know, all the topics that what good, good customer looks like. Yeah, it's our values, communication, integrity, partnership, education, updates, logisticizing, et cetera, et cetera. That's what separates Zipline from the rest out there. Yeah, it's, it's clearly there in our NPS score. 74 reminder.
That was funny. Five times the industry average. Folks, get into it. As always, if you want to talk about high end customer service, you can give us a call. 888-Go-Zipline. Www.ziplinelogistics.com we'd love to chat with you.
For our listeners out there, please leave a five star review. Most likely on Apple or Spotify. They're the only ratable platforms. I'm, I'm being told you are correct. Yeah. That helps us get the message out for all of our truck. Yeah. Listeners, high end customer service. I'm passionate about it. Teddy. You're passionate about it?
[00:19:07] Speaker B: We are.
[00:19:07] Speaker A: It's a big, big element of why we've been here for 12 plus years and look forward to being here for another 12 plus years. Thanks for joining us on another edition of the Zipline Logistics podcast. We will see you next time, everybody.
[00:19:21] Speaker B: Bye.
