With an aim to establish themselves as the "Shopify for the freight forwarders”, Freightify's mission is digitalizing the traditional logistics companies and freight forwarders. They automate operational-heavy tasks like rate procurement, rate management, quotes, freight scheduling, and tracking, by relying on timely notifications to connect freight forwarders and customers.
However, end-users may miss these business-centered notifications if they don't appear to come from the logistics company itself. This creates an added issue of managing notifications for multiple brands and their providers, taking up to a quarter of months of developers’ time.
SuprSend collaborated with Swaminathan Natarajan, the head of product at Freightify who is a strong advocate for a customer-centric approach, to solve this pressing problem without any added developer dependencies.
Freightify's initial notification system had complex individual modules, as developers had to create new templates for every new brand and notification type that was added to the system, making it unsustainable.
Freightify’s product team faced the problem acutely with emails which play a critical role in any freight forwarder’s notification system. However, it was these 3 major pain points that ultimately motivated them to try SuprSend!
Freightify recognized the low engagement rate of their old notification system particularly due to limited customization options. The trigger for revamping their notification system became even more apparent when their customers directly started asking for customized templating features, which was proving to be unmanageable for Freightify at scale.
“Considering we’re a SaaS in the freight forwarding industry, every customer wanted to have their customized notification sent, which would require a lot of maintenance work from our side. Given that it wasn't our primary focus, allocating resources for it was difficult.”
Freightify has a large customer base of freight forwarders, each with its unique branding guidelines. The task of creating brand-specific templates for every type of notification for each brand was time-consuming for developers and not scalable.
“Design plays a major role in branding. With our native notification system, the controls weren’t very great and flexible on the templates… We just used to update the logo for branding, which wasn’t enough.”
Freightify used SuprSend branding API to programmatically save brands and customize notifications dynamically as per their customer’s brand guidelines (brand_id, brand_name, logo, brand properties, brand_colors (primary_color, secondary_color, tertiary_color), and social_links) in just one API call.
“We’re now iterating different content for different sets of customers, right from a single dashboard,” says Swami.
Using SuprSend’s Brand Management capability, Freightify now easily manages and updates brand information for all notifications by configuring it just once on SuprSend, saving a lot of developers’ time.
“Earlier, the templates were part of the code, and so the designs were fixed, and to change even the smallest part, we had to go through the dev cycle again. We were looking for something to make this quick, and experiment on the fly.”
Templates need to adjust dynamically based on brand elements to look good, but in the original notification system, this wasn't possible for Freightify. SuprSend fixed this by providing powerful template editors on the dashboard that the design team could control as per the brand elements.
For instance, TopCargo, a customer of Freightify, has a light logo. SuprSend’s notification template dynamically adjusts to a dark theme background to improve notification readability based on a few brand properties.
With managing notifications for multiple brands, another challenge that Freightify faced was handling different vendors for each logistics company, as companies wanted their notifications to go via their brand handle (e.g. company domain name for email, registered company header for SMS, and WhatsApp).
To send email notifications, they utilized SuprSend's brand API to send messages on behalf of their customer's domain.
However, for SMS and WhatsApp notifications, they had to use individual vendor accounts for each brand, which resulted in storing and managing access keys for multiple vendors and integrating APIs with each of them, leading to excessive development and frequent cross-call errors.
SuprSend streamlined this in a single API call by allowing Freightify to configure ‘providers’ for each brand and routing notifications through them, eliminating the need for multiple API integrations.
With operations spanning 45 countries, Freightify has truly established a global presence. One of the challenges this brings is the localization of notifications to ensure seamless communication across borders.
Swami comments, ‘Our customers want to have the content in their own language style.’
With SuprSend’s multi-lingual notification feature, they created notifications in 5 languages, English, Spanish, French, Mandarin, and German, with a single click.
When asked about the future use case for SuprSend, Swami stated,
“We will be adding more events in notification modules in the coming times, and would want the customers to channel their notification preferences by subscribing or unsubscribing, without our intervention.”
SuprSend enables companies to manage their customers' notification preferences easily, without any extra management on their end. In the case of Freightify, preferences could be controlled at three levels: the Freightify admin level, the freight forwarder, and the end user. Each level can set which notifications should be sent and on what channels, giving the end user a delightful notification experience without constantly changing the source code.
Recognizing that building a capability not central to their core business would receive limited attention in the development cycle and result in a poor user experience, Freightify carefully evaluated their options.
Swami also shares his future plans for SuprSend integration, including web push and in-app notifications. Interestingly, now it would be much simpler for them to add new channels.
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With custom branding and multi-lingual notifications, Freightify boosted the notification engagement rate for freight forwarders by 300%. The improved notification system, facilitated by notifications with customized branding, resulted in a 30% increase in the quote-win ratio.
With just a single API call, Freightify now sends thousands of unique notifications across multiple channels for leading freight forwarding companies such as Vanguard and TopCrew and their customers, solidifying their position as a top player in the digitalization of the freight forwarding industry.
