Faster quoting with cargo.one pro saves the BTG team one working day per week and delights their customers

The introduction of cargo.one pro has helped BTG reduce its time-to-quote from hours to minutes, resulting in double the quotes handled per week, happier partners, and more shipments won.

“cargo.one pro makes things so much easier – we love it. It removes manual work, giving us more time for customer service and handling complex shipments, which is how we differentiate ourselves from larger forwarders.” — Sarah Gerken, Head of Airfreight at BTG

Challenges

• Meeting market demands to offer quick quotations
• Growing the business in a tight labor market

BTG Internationale Spedition, established in 1973, has grown into a significant, independent logistics provider known for servicing a diverse range of air freight shipments. With a reputation built on delivering service, quality, and reliability, BTG specializes in handling complex logistics such as Formula One racing cars, motorcycles, and even tanks.

Sarah Gerken, Head of Air Freight, has been instrumental in navigating BTG through the increasingly competitive and challenging logistics landscape, leading their two air freight teams in Germany. Reflecting on BTG's position in the market, Sarah states, "While the large freight forwarders might excel in standard freight with their automated systems, BTG differentiates itself through personalized customer service and handling niche market demands that require careful coordination and rapid responses."

She emphasizes the importance of speed in business development, noting, "Increasing cost sensitivity by shippers has made it tougher to win shipments. Lately, a reduction in attractive capacity to Asia has also been a challenge.”

"It’s harder to win business these days. All you can do is provide excellent customer service and be really, really quick in quoting and responding to customers. That’s the only option.”

A long-awaited solution to accelerate the quotation process

The need for speed, however, contrasted with the reality that BTG faced when quoting customers: a highly tedious and time-consuming process. The team had to manually log into each airline’s system to retrieve air freight rates, which for a standard quote with three airline options, would take around 20 minutes for each airline. In many cases, they had to request rates via email from airlines that did not have an online portal, leading to waiting times of up to two to three hours.

Adding other end-to-end costs was equally manual and slow. BTG used a spreadsheet where standard charges like customs fees were saved, but all other variable costs—such as pickup and airport delivery, handling, and more—had to be calculated and filled in manually. They then had to work out, also manually, the margin and copy everything into a suitable format to send a quote via email.

Aware of the inefficiencies in their quoting process, Sarah immediately saw an opportunity when cargo.one introduced their quoting solutions. When asked how cargo.one pro has changed things at BTG, Sarah didn’t hesitate:

“It’s changed everything. Now we just enter the shipment on cargo.one, select the airline options we like based on live market rates, and all of our other charges are already uploaded into the system. It’s just 3 clicks and the quote is ready to go. I love it.”

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Sarah also appreciates the look of the quotes generated on cargo.one, which are presented in a PDF format: “It shows everything in a very clear way, including the various flight and airline possibilities, and the total price per option. It just looks more professional than our previous email quotes.” But perhaps what she loves most is that all quotes are saved on their cargo.one account, allowing her entire team to easily access them when needed: “We don’t have to search through long email threads anymore to find quotes when it’s time to make settlements, which makes things a lot easier for us.”

Removing email ping pong with cargo.one Storefront

Sarah and the BTG team didn’t stop there. They launched their own customer portal with cargo.one Storefront, allowing their partners to get quotes directly without sending emails or waiting for responses.

Whenever BTG receives a request for a quote from a new agent, they send the quote with a link to their Storefront. From that point onwards, the partner can get instant quotes for any shipment. These quotes are dynamically generated using cargo.one’s live airline rates and BTG’s cost profile, ensuring agents receive the same rates they would via email – but without the wait.

This has significantly reduced the back-and-forth email communication that used to plague the quoting process. “We don’t have to wait for hundreds of emails anymore,” Sarah explains. “Agents often don’t provide all details initially and frequently ask for different options or revisions later on. With Storefront, they can see all available options from the beginning and edit the shipment details as they see fit without waiting for us to respond.”

Faster quotes, happier customers

Streamlined processes for BTG translated into increased customer satisfaction. Sarah explains that their partners love the 24/7 service: “We work with many agents in Asia, with whom we have six to eight hours of time difference. Before, if they had a shipment in the morning, they would have to wait until the afternoon to get our quotes. Now, with Storefront, they can get our rates immediately, anytime they need, which allows them to quote their customers faster than the competition.

”In turn, this translates into more business for BTG. One notable example is a partner they hold in Jakarta. Sarah explains, “We get 40 to 50 percent more shipments from them now because they can quote quickly and choose their preferred flights. One of their top customers is a local consignee who values speed above all and always wants the fastest quote. So Storefront has been a game changer for them, and they are very happy with it.”

In fact, after experiencing their Storefront, some of BTG’s partners have built their own. Sarah adds, “We have two customers in North America that have now joined cargo.one pro because they were so happy with it that they wanted to offer it to their customers too.”

Winning back time for new business development

Beyond better customer service, cargo.one pro has also enabled BTG to serve more customers, explains Sarah: “We’ve gone from one or two hours to put together a single quote to just two minutes, which has allowed us to double the number of requests we can handle per day.

”This substantial increase in productivity is particularly beneficial in a tight labor market. “It’s very hard to recruit people these days,” Sarah admits. “We’ve saved about one working day per week for the entire team. That’s one day they can now focus on sales and other high-value activities instead of manually quoting shipments.” The BTG team is happier as a result:

“The team loves it because there’s nothing more exhausting than waiting. And it was a lot of waiting before. So they’re really quite happy as they can now concentrate on the things they love, like building relationships and getting shipments from A to B, and not waiting for email replies."

In an ever-changing industry where speed is more important than ever, with cargo.one pro BTG is well-positioned to ensure it remains at the forefront, competing strongly with its excellent and fast customer service.