Ever bought an artisanal onion? Or bespoke pants? Or a homemade cake? Your typical, garden-variety human gets on some level that a thing tends to be “better” somehow if another human made it. It is all part of customer service, and in logistics customer service, experiences are built on personalization and the highest quality.
But here’s the curly bit. We also get, on another level, that marketers know that fact and trade on it.
The other day, I was at the grocery store and saw a delicious-looking packet of cake-like things advertised as “just like homemade.” Just like? What does that mean? And I swear that artisanal onion is just a regular onion, only slightly cleaner.
So all of that is to say, we get it. You’re skeptical. If you’ve spent any time looking through our website, you’ve probably landed on some claim of ours that we offer a uniquely human touch to managed logistics and wondered … is that good … really?
Or is this just another bit of marketing speak?
In this blog, we’ll prove to you mathematically (OK, not mathematically per se, but at least with a solid slab of decent exposition, and there might even be numbers) that our managed transportation company offers something way more meaningful than the logistics equivalent of an artisanal onion.
So let’s talk about the human touch and why, yes, it absolutely matters.
Attentiveness
Person A has a problem. Person B reassures them that they are there to listen and proceeds to nod along while skimming the Fall Bumper Edition of Better Homes and Garden. Knowing someone who will listen doesn’t count for much. Knowing an expert who will listen and respond — I mean with a careful, considered, and experience-driven response — that counts for a lot.
Let’s say something is going seriously wrong with a delivery. The carrier is shrugging at you. The customer is tapping their foot, waiting for you to make everything OK.
If you call us at that moment, our bread and butter compared to others, a supply chain expert will pick up. Even better, you’ll know them, and they’ll know you and your company. We’ll listen carefully and then partner with you to find a way through the challenge. Flash forward to your next quarterly business review. As supply chain consultants, our team and yours will get the chance to sit down and figure out how to avoid that problem moving forward.
IL2000 is attentive. We listen as though your situation matters because, to us, it does. This is the kind of active responsiveness that sends a warm ripple of stuff-going-right-that-might-otherwise-have-gone-wrong through your company and eases your way to better results.
It makes a big difference.
Sensibleness
It’s weird that sensibleness is frequently seen as a hokey and homespun quality these days.
Compare it to intelligence for a minute. Now that word has this lofty, precision-engineered feel to it. It wafts of engine grease and tells a tale of precision-crafted lenses that can see what an atom ate for lunch. “Intelligent” evokes folk in lab coats building computers that can solve humanity’s biggest challenges while inventing strawberry-flavored radiation and calculating pi to infinity.
In pretty much any corner of the industry, “intelligence” has an all-season pass to the relevance club. But sensible? Grandma was sensible. And she smelled of mothballs.
In truth, sensibleness is everything in a field like logistics. We work in an intensely details-focused industry. Each and every shipment is filled with details. And each of those details? They’re not just data points, not just numeric. Every detail vibrates with the potential for uncertainty.
Take a truck-bound shipment.
Of course, the truck itself has valves and threading and tubes in it, all of which can break. But a fallible human is driving that truck. They’re likely also part of a family of other equally fallible humans who get COVID and mumps or need to go to hockey practice every Tuesday night, rain, hail or shine. And this is just one example of a myriad of potential moments where you’re dealing with a Schrödinger’s box shipment scenario where something could go right … or it could go wrong … and you’ll only find out when you open the box. Details, details. Thousands of the tricky little things - not one of them simply captured or easily controlled via a system alone.
Sensibleness makes that maelstrom of moving targets manageable. Case in point: Before that driver sets out in the morning, one of our people will talk to them. We’ll get a bead on what’s going on out on the road, and if they are ill or tired or dealing with any of a million other possible variables, we will know about it and be working with them to adjust.
Sensibleness is a crucial part of our human touch, and it keeps your supply chain manageable in ways that a blind algorithm or generic workflow could never do.
Discernment
Finally, let’s talk about scams, obfuscation, and risk.
Dishonest operators abound right now in logistics. You’ll get carriers who swear black and blue that they’re local operators with a thousand meaningful shortcuts in their delivery cities. Scratch the surface, and you’ll learn they’re a middle-person selling leads on to other operators. Scratch deeper and you’ll discover their business address is a Wendy’s on the other side of the country.
That sounds like a joke or an exaggeration, but it’s neither.
Beneath that obvious layer of commercial deceit, you’ll find countless carriers operating in a “gray zone” somewhere between honesty and dishonesty. Here, you’ll find an exotic mixup of hidden charges, opaque transportation arrangements and general “race-to-the-bottom” style pricing strategies that deliver just about any result imaginable — except for a reliable one.
In this kind of carrier landscape, you just can’t make quick selection decisions at the expense of carefulness. There’s too much at stake, too great a likelihood of getting burned.
Our team goes fast but steady, working to identify a bespoke network of carriers for your supply chain. In the vast majority of cases, these carriers are companies we already know. They’re people we trust, and we will have a history with them.
If we need to identify new carriers for your operation, we’ll vet them carefully.
We look at the address of potential partners. We check to see if they have a legitimate location. If someone is registered to a nail salon or a laundromat, that’ll be our first clue that something weird is going on. We’ll even ask a carrier questions about their neighborhood. Where do they go for lunch? What’s their favorite sports team?
All of this takes time, but by doing this right, we build efficient and trustworthy machinery for you, and your freight gets to move fast and seamlessly in the hands of capable providers.
At the end of the day, supply chain efficiency isn’t something that happens on autopilot. It happens when an experienced supply chain expert pays close attention … and gets all squinty-eyed and suspicious when experience tells them that something feels a bit off.
Logistics customer service: Made by humans
You can measure how quickly a customer support person responded to your support request, but that tells you nothing about how deeply they listened or how vested they were in finding a good outcome. You can plot your BI on fifteen different graphs, reducing each moving part of your supply chain to a data point. But reality is analog, not digital. Sensible course corrections are a part of life. You can move fast and make quick, agile decisions. But agility without discernment is just … kind of … flopping about and hoping for the best.
Attentiveness, sensibleness, and discernment. These qualities are neither clear-cut nor easy to quantify, but they are critical to your success. And these valuable assets are produced exclusively by smart and motivated humans who know what they’re doing.
Wanna meet some? Talk to IL2000 today.