Web Application Development
Complex, data-heavy products that stay fast under real load.
Logistics & Transportation · 2025
Replacing 400 status calls a day with a customer visibility portal
A national third-party logistics provider was losing bids over visibility capability and burning customer service capacity on status requests. We built a shipment tracking platform on top of their existing TMS.
- Client
- National 3PL
- Duration
- 6 months
- Services
- 4 practices involved
Placeholder content. These engagement details illustrate structure and formatting. They are not reported client results and will be replaced with verified client stories before this site goes live.
Results
- Inbound status calls within four months
- -62%Inbound status calls within four months
- Enterprise bids advanced past the visibility requirement
- 9 of 11Enterprise bids advanced past the visibility requirement
- Driver app adoption within six weeks
- 94%Driver app adoption within six weeks
- Daily customer service capacity returned
- 4.2 hrsDaily customer service capacity returned
The challenge
What was actually going wrong
The operator moved thousands of loads a week across a carrier network, coordinated through a legacy TMS with no customer-facing interface. Shippers who wanted status called customer service, and the team handled roughly four hundred such calls daily — none of which created any value beyond reassurance.
The commercial cost was larger than the operational one. Enterprise shippers had begun requiring real-time visibility as a bid qualification, and the operator was losing opportunities before pricing was even discussed. Two competitors had launched portals in the previous eighteen months.
An earlier attempt at a portal had stalled. It had been built directly against the TMS database, broke whenever the vendor updated, and surfaced data that frequently contradicted what dispatch was telling customers by phone.
Our approach
How we worked the problem
- 01
Establish one source of truth
Before building any interface we reconciled the three systems reporting shipment status — TMS, telematics and driver check calls — into a single event stream with clear precedence rules. Contradictory data had undermined the previous attempt and would have undermined this one.
- 02
Integrate through a stable layer
Rather than reading the TMS database directly, we built an integration service with its own data model. Vendor updates now break one adapter we control instead of the entire product.
- 03
Design for the person who was going to call
We interviewed shipper-side logistics coordinators to understand exactly what prompted a call. Most were checking one of four things, so the portal surfaces those four immediately rather than presenting a dashboard.
- 04
Give drivers a reason to update
Status accuracy depends on drivers, so the mobile app was designed to take under fifteen seconds per update, work without signal, and replace paperwork they already disliked. Adoption followed because it saved them time.
- 05
Roll out by account
The portal launched with six accounts, expanded weekly, and reached full availability over three months. Each cohort surfaced data quality issues that were fixed before the next group arrived.
The outcome
What changed afterward
The visibility requirement stopped being a reason to lose bids, which was the outcome that justified the investment. The customer service capacity freed up was redeployed to exception management, where the team now resolves problems proactively rather than answering questions about them.
The integration layer has since absorbed two TMS vendor updates without customer-facing disruption, and it now serves as the foundation for an analytics program covering lane profitability and carrier performance.
“The portal is what we show in the first meeting now. It changed the conversation from whether we can support the account to how quickly we can start.”
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Services used in this engagement
API Development
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