How 3PLs Can Use AI & Analytics for Insightful Customer Analysis

The need to improve reporting?about customers?is a recurring theme in analytics conversations among logistics?providers. Everyone from large-scale 3PLs to small freight brokerages do their best to?provide?internal managers and executives with impactful and insightful findings about?their customers. Yet, amidst this pursuit, challenges?inevitably arise?ranging from speed to value to quality.?

Take, for example, shipment reports.??

While every 3PL generates internal shipment volume and cost reports?to varying degrees, the critical question looms: are these analyses truly delivering value??

Several?factors can lead to reports that – at best – clutter up executive inboxes, and – at worst – undermine internal confidence?in the?reporting team’s?handling of the data.??

Some of these?detrimental factors include:

• Limited customer metrics that lack insightful trend analysis
• Outliers and other unusual patterns that skew otherwise solid findings?
• Data quality issues that lead to inaccurate insights??

In this blog post, we'll address some of these limitations as they?relate specifically to customer shipment analysis,?and we'll outline three different analysis strategies that you can use?to?improve insights into customer trends and behaviors.?

Limited Metrics & How to Gain Better Insights?

Conventional shipment reports encompass historical and descriptive metrics like shipment volume and delivery times – necessary and important?for sure,?but far from an?insightful strategic picture. You can augment these findings with broader volume analysis?metrics.?

#1 – Look at ‘flipping’?and ‘missing’?customers through a new lens.?

Basic?reporting of?customers’?volumes that show?a time-period?of a week?or?a month?is always a good start.?When paired with intelligent alerting?and forecasting, this analysis can be a powerful tool to help protect against lost revenue.

For example,?if a traditionally?high-volume customer begins trending downward, then that is absolutely something a 3PL customer sales team wants to be aware of as early as possible.?

However,?when you?climb higher?into rollup-level analysis, then you?gain?new insights?into the?big?picture?and see?important patterns?in the customer base.?Try?bucketing?customers into low, medium and high volume groups,?and then?identify?and track trends across bucket?groups?over time. Seeing?shifts among high-, medium-, and low-volume gives you a more complete and detailed?understanding of?how?your?customers – and?revenue – fluctuate?together. Not only does this?alert you to imminent changes,?but it?also suggests strategic alterations to the 3PL's service focus may be in order, or at the very least, something to monitor. ?

‘New’?and ‘missing’?customer?reports?provide further depth, enabling proactive strategies for business retention and acquisition. When paired with high-,?medium-,?low-volume analysis, new actions may even be recommended.

For example,?in a freight broker scenario a ‘missing’?customer report showing?a?drop in the low-volume customer?category?can trigger?specific?action plans, such as focused pricing changes or an automated increase?response rate to inbound email quotes.?

Go to our blog to learn about the other two analysis strategies you can use to improve insights into customer trends and behaviors.

Download Your Free Shipment Report ???

With detailed?tracking and understanding of customer behaviors and volumes, 3PLs can craft customized engagement strategies that potentially turn low-volume customers into high-yield relationships.

An augmented report can help 3PLs:

• Improve their customer retention and growth strategies
• Add the ability to predict customer trends
• Detect missing and flipping customers with ease

Do more with your freight data with Axiom-One.

Third Axiom's AI-powered analytics software – Axiom-One – is built by veterans of the transportation industry just for 3PLs and freight brokers. It's the fastest way to find the hidden “ahas” that lead to higher margins and lower costs. ??