FIRESIDE CHAT TOPIC: FreightTech is all about the customer experience
DETAILS: A discussion on designing and managing winning freight technology solutions.
INTERVIEWER AND SPEAKER: Kevin Hill, executive publisher at FreightWaves, and Michael Newcity, chief innovation officer at ArcBest (NASDAQ: ARCB) and president of ArcBest Technologies.
BIO: Newcity has held several senior leadership positions at ArcBest in his 27-year career with the company. He has led a variety of corporate initiatives in business intelligence, e-commerce, market research and strategy management. Newcity was ArcBest’s CFO from 2010 to 2014. In 2013, his role was expanded to include oversight of information technology and economic analysis.
KEY QUOTES FROM NEWCITY:
On key ingredients for making technology work for customers: “I think more about an attitude or an approach in how we design these technologies. We listen, we’re agile, we respond, we’re aware and we change. We really try to put ourselves in the shoes of our customers.”
On the recent acquisition of truckload broker MoLo Solutions: “In the short term, the Molo acquisition doubles the capacity between our two organizations to nearly 80,000 carriers, which helps us better serve customers. It also gives us a large facility in Chicago, an innovation hub, as we well know in the brokerage industry. In terms of technology, [ArcBest] is bringing some strong digital capabilities to MoLo that will make it easier for their employees, their customers and carriers to do business.”
On advice to FreightTech entrepreneurs: “They’ve got to be willing to have the bandwidth to kind of sit down — especially if they don’t have a product that’s got existing revenue or existing customers — they’ve got to be willing to sit down and work through a co-creation process with a company like ArcBest.”