Help Scout for Logistics

Logistics companies rely heavily on communication to manage both customer communication and internal operations. Customers may have questions on their shipments confirmations, seek delivery updates, or inquire about their billing. You may need to communicate news or changes that impact your delivery or warehouse staff, but information is trapped in personal Outlook inboxes.

A tool like a shared inbox allows your various departments to keep overall awareness of what is being communicated with customers, all in one place. Regardless of the way you’re receiving communication, these conversations can all be handled in the same shared inbox. 

Whether a customer sends an email to shipping@ in search of information about a delayed package, or writes to customercare@ for help filing a claim for a damaged delivery, having a shared inbox provides a direct line of communication that your staff can access. You may need to discuss unexpected delays with relevant vendors and and loop in internal staff as needed.

With all your communication now in Help Scout, you can use certain features in the app such as tags and custom fields to help you to properly categorize emails. For example, you might be interested in categorizing by topics such as quotes, shipment tracking, delivery requests, and so on. Organizing your email conversations can help you spot for trends in common questions and issues your clients have.  

Your staff can also make use of features that will help them streamline their work. Productivity tools like saved replies are helpful for procedural answers which could make up a bulk of the work. Not only can this be a time-saving resource, but having standardized saved replies can also help reduce errors and provide consistent service.

Given the wide variety of inquiries you receive, having access to a FAQ site can help your clients and vendors find consistent information at any time.  

Allow your customers to find instant answers whenever they need them by creating a public facing knowledge base. Use this to field frequently asked questions, such as how to cancel or correct order information, what payment methods are accepted, or how to track shipment. Customers may also be curious about your delivery and returns policies.  

Similarly, an internal knowledge base can help your own staff find information they need to answer questions accurately and consistently.  Your staff can quickly reference this documentation in order to better help customers or carry out tasks, perhaps to review internal procedures or to read step-by-step guides for handling common scenarios. Not only does this provide your staff the resources they need to do their work well, but an internal knowledge base ensures that knowledge is preserved and easily accessible as your company grows. 

When customers or vendors need to get in contact with you, they are likely to go straight to your website. There is a tool within Help Scout called Beacon, which you can use to provide wide support to your clients. 

It is an embeddable widget that offers a way for communication via a contact form, shares your knowledge base articles, and even has a feature that serves as an AI-powered agent that can answer questions. This feature, called AI Answers, determines its responses based on your existing knowledge base and any extra web sources like pages of your website.

Embedding a Beacon on your website and offering a fast way to find answers in your knowledge base FAQ or interacting with the AI-powered agent makes it easy for people to get help, even outside of your business hours. This one-stop approach to get the help they need will be a useful timesaver for customers and vendors, and will free up your staff to focus on other responsibilities at hand.