Brokers are notoriously bogged down by emails. Drafting messages – from quotes to shipment updates – can be a time-consuming and frustrating process. Tai Software recognized this problem years ago and has continuously worked to improve the email experience for both brokers and their customers.
“Email is the primary mechanism we use to communicate. Our system sent out over half a million emails last month,” Tai Software CEO Walter Mitchell said. “Email is such a core component and key piece of a broker’s life, and there is a huge opportunity to streamline that.”
Tai has been working on email improvements utilizing AI and machine learning for over three years now. Most recently, the company introduced a new email feature – helping brokers write emails – created via an integration with Google Bard.
Tai utilizes AI to extract shipment details and respond to quote requests within a matter of minutes, all without hands-on input from the broker. Even when brokers do sit down to respond to emails themselves, utilizing generative AI can turn a 10-minute menial task into a one-minute task by drafting appropriate messages and responses.
This frees up brokers to do the types of work they are best at while increasing efficiency, reducing costs and ultimately driving up profits.
This solution does not require an all-or-nothing approach to deliver results.
“Even if you just reduce the amount of time spent on emails by half, that is a tremendous value to anyone,” Mitchell said.
Not only can brokers streamline their email responses, but Tai’s suite of email solutions can also read an incoming email, find the shipment it applies to and connect it to the TMS. This makes sorting and storing relevant emails easier than ever before, ultimately leading to saved time and frustration for both the broker and the customer.
In addition to reducing the amount of time brokers spend in their inboxes, utilizing AI to manage emails prevents the missed opportunities that arise from overlooked or neglected messages.
If a broker can provide good follow-up and keep people informed, it naturally leads to a better customer experience and higher win rates.
In fact, if you reduce the time it takes to quote on a full truckload shipment from 45 minutes to five minutes – which is what Tai’s email does – brokers can see their win rates increase as much as 33%, according to Mitchell.
This increase in win rate is tied closely to an improved customer experience. Often, the people requesting quotes are doing so in the middle of an otherwise busy day. Much of the work these people need to complete does not involve sitting at a computer, meaning they must continuously switch between desk work and manual labor while waiting for quotes to come through.
By reducing the amount of time it takes to fulfill a quote request, Tai increases the odds that the requester is still sitting at their computer when the quote comes through.
“You have helped that guy tremendously because he’s not context-switching anymore,” Mitchell said. “He is not leaving his deskfor another task and then coming back later to check for quotes. You are keeping the client engaged by responding instantly”
As technology continues to evolve, Tai hopes to see this process – from email request to quote – go from taking minutes to taking seconds. Mitchell believes providing this on-demand customer experience will drive win rates even higher.
Beyond saving brokers’ time and driving up win rates, integrating with Tai to manage emails allows brokers to capture all the data stored in their inboxes via AI. This, in turn, fuels future technological innovation and helps ensure brokers are able to seamlessly adopt more cutting edge tools in the future.
“Not only are we making it so that brokers are faster on their emails, but we are making it faster to pull all the data from those emails without having to do extra work,” Mitchell said. “The brokers are then set up for where AI could be headed because AI needs your data in order to take the next step.”
Tai is dedicated to creating solutions today that enable its partners to step into an even more technologically-advanced future tomorrow. That dedication is demonstrated across the company’s entire suite of services.
“Our job as a tech provider is simply to help our customers take advantage of upcoming technology,” Mitchell said.
AI is the technology of the moment, and Tai is harnessing it in order to drive new levels of supply chain integration. For Mitchell, however, this work is less about AI itself and more about the wider technological advancements that AI represents.
“All of us in the technology space have a responsibility to help make the freight broker’s life better. AI is a great tool for doing that today by helping improve the flexibility of what we can handle,” Mitchell said. “Normally, when we work with automation, we work with rigid lines. AI allows us to make those lines a little blurry, which expands the net of what we can capture.”
Technology, as a whole, will continue widening the net of what providers can capture as newer and more cutting edge tools emerge.
Tai believes technology should allow brokers to focus on the work they are good at and take away the work that is distracting from their primary goal of managing freight.