November 28, 2017 – As our American friends celebrate Thanksgiving and we all look ahead to Christmas many shipping companies are gearing up for the busiest time of the year. In our personal lives, thanks to small orders from the likes of Amazon, we are able to track our gifts from the depot to the door. This is a huge weight off our mind and allows us to plan our lives accordingly – sounds perfect right? But what we’ve done for personal shoppers, we haven’t yet managed to apply to the shipping industry.
This isn’t because the resources aren’t there; there is a lot of information available on each individual shipment – but many companies fail to access it and pass it on to customers; and those that do often fail to notify them when it matters most.
Just as we plan our personal lives around our deliveries of shopping, clothes or gadgets, companies plan their business and stock around their shipments arriving on time and in one piece! There’s nothing worse for a company than to lose a shipment.
Track with us and stay updated
At Twill our motto is ‘shipping made simple’ and we have worked to tackle this foundational problem within the shipping industry from our earliest stages. When you track your shipments with us you’ll stay updated throughout your cargo’s journey. We’ve broken down the process and identified seven key milestones throughout a shipment – from arriving at port for loading to the vessel departing/arriving and import customs cleared – we monitor the shipment daily and as each milestone is reached you are automatically contacted and updated.
Other companies in the industry only check shipments every few days and any customer will tell you that a lot can happen in that time! By taking a proactive approach, checking daily and utilising automated emails it means that as soon as changes happen, you are made aware.
Knowing when shipments reach certain milestones is particularly important to our customers in the UK, for example. As mentioned, for so many businesses it’s crucial that they know when vessels have arrived at port, as they plan everything around this to ensure they have the right amount of stock in their stores at any given time. If there is a delay in the shipment, our updates allow us to notify them quickly so that they can make the appropriate adjustments.
Building for the future
At Twill we want to not just introduce this process for our customers, but build on it and make it even better. We want to make shipping simple and this is an important step toward that goal.
Looking to the future just think about the possibilities if we could automate this service – allowing our system to talk and share information and go one step further towards providing updates to our customers in real-time. This is our aim and we’re really excited about the prospect of making shipping even simpler for our customers.
-Alex Archer, Customer Care UK