The challenge
A Bangalore-based international freight forwarder handling FCL and LCL ocean shipments across 14 trade lanes was losing SME business to faster forwarders. Inbound RFQs landed in shared inbox, were manually keyed into rate sheets across MSC, Maersk and CMA, then quoted back over email — median 38 hours. Customers chased them by WhatsApp daily for shipping bills, BL drafts and container status. Three coordinators were doing nothing but copy-paste.
How we deployed
- Built an RFQ parser that extracted POL, POD, commodity, weight, volume and INCOTERMS from email, PDF or WhatsApp text.
- Wired carrier rate sheets and NVOCC tariffs into a single rate-comparison engine that surfaced top-3 options per lane.
- Sent draft quotes to a salesperson Slack with one-click approve, edit or reject before customer reply went out.
- Auto-collected customs documents — invoice, packing list, COO, GSTR-1 extract — over WhatsApp with structured prompts.
- Pushed container-status updates from carrier APIs to customer WhatsApp at gate-in, gate-out, vessel-departure and ETA-72h.
What changed
- RFQ-to-quote turnaround collapsed from 38 hours to 22 minutes on standard lanes.
- Monthly RFQ volume the firm could handle grew 2.4× with the same coordinator team.
- 94% of customs document packs landed complete on the first WhatsApp ask, up from 41% over email.
- Customer CSAT climbed from 3.6 to 4.7 driven entirely by proactive container updates.
- Net-new SME shipper sign-ups grew 71% on word-of-mouth from existing customers.
"We used to lose deals because the customer had three quotes from competitors before we even opened the email. Now we are first in their inbox every single time."
— Director · International Freight Forwarder