Improving Shipping Rate Accuracy to Improve Customer Satisfaction

Shipping rates are complicated on a good day. From fuel surcharges to GRI’s to everything else that goes into calculating a freight rate, maintaining shipping rate accuracy is a challenge for everyone involved in international transportation.

Shippers and BCO’s understand the pain and the impact to them can be overpaying by 5 to 10% on their logistics costs – with most feeling powerless to do anything about it. The main reason is most find it too difficult to audit their freight invoices and as a result rarely even try. 

But, shipping rate accuracy is important on the other side of the transaction too. Forwarders and NVOCC’s have vendors they pay as well so they are just as at risk for not calculating their costs correctly. A global, door to door, shipment can involve a lot of different parties; each potentially has their own contracts and fees. As a forwarder, mis-calculating just one cost component can erase your profit margin, or worse yet cause you to lose money on the shipment. 

Clearly, operating manually in the world of global shipping is no longer an option. A simple and cost effective solution to maintaining high shipping rate accuracy is to utilize a freight rate management technology. These tools are built to make calculating freight costs simple and accurate. 

The ROI of the right freight rate automation tool can easily justify the cost. Catching just one or two rating errors can cover the cost of a system for a month or even a year. The value of rate management technology extends beyond simply ensuring shipping rate accuracy. Keeping rates centrally managed for global teams is another. For example, Catapult QMS, the global freight rate management platform, can be accessed from anywhere in the world and provides customers with 99.7% shipping rate accuracy. Catapult QMS also speeds up the quoting process – making what used to take hours or days now just a simple, instant calculation.