November 16, 2017 – When I first joined Twill, I loved its motto on very first sight – shipping made simple. It sounds like a great idea in a world where we have so much information to digest and so much data we can consume, right? For a system to be able to make something so complicated – such as shipping goods from one side of the globe to the other – sound so simple, it has to be exciting as a concept!
Defining simplicity
I worked for many years in IT, and in previous roles I‘ve participated in the build process of quite a few systems, both big and small. But I‘ve never seen a system that looks so “seamlessly simple” on the outside, but which has numerous obstacles that need to be overcome in order to get it there.
So what does Twill set out to achieve? Some dictionaries define “simple” as “easy to access” and “plausible” and that makes a lot of sense for our shipment business.
For us, “easy to access” means that we only provide information that is needed at a particular moment in the process. Making data “plausible” must give the option for our customers to drill down in case they want more context to understand exactly what is going on with their shipment.
So how does Twill do it?
Through the Twill platform we offer our customers a very simple to use, web-based front-end, so that they can check on their shipment quickly from a huge variety of devices, wherever they are in the world.
I could take this opportunity to provide more detail on how that front-end is structured itself, but I’m not going to go into that level of technical detail here.
Instead, let’s look at how our team of Twillers embrace our vision. We want things to be as simple for our customers as possible – and our employees play a vital role in that.
Shipping made simple
As a team, we can access so much data from the Twill platform that we have built our own internal dashboards to simplify the information that we use when handling our customers‘ bookings.
For example, in our offices we have monitors on the walls showing graphs of activity of various parts of our platform – which not only makes for interesting viewing, but also means that this information is easily to hand for all IT staff, providing the ability to quickly spot trends and any warning signs.
A lot of the work that the Twill team does is unseen by our consignees and shippers – and of course we want to keep it that way! The more seamless it feels, the better the experience for our customers.
In order to achieve that, we‘ve built numerous tools into the Twill platform to synchronize with our partners and be able to anticipate and communicate any issues before they occur. That means that we can address them before the customer even knows about them – making their lives simpler.
The end goal
Twill is all about making life as simple as possible for our customers. Are we there yet? Of course not! But we are making great progress.
We have a long list of features and a huge development path which we are working on in order to make shipping even simpler for our customers. But what I can say is that the whole Twill team is working towards that goal and I’m happy to be a part of that.
-Christoph Frei, CTO