6 Signs Your Courier Software Might Be Holding You Back

Throughout North America right now, there are thousands of courier and logistics companies running their businesses around the clock. Each of these companies has chosen a set of tools to help drive their business forward. Each organization uses different software, policies, workforces, and procedures and while all of these operational elements are necessary for each business to operate, some tools provide a more significant advantage than others. Sadly, not all of these tools can be easily changed and tested. Still, it is possible to adjust a few of them and see instant improvements in your business and growth. As veterans in this industry, we’ve paid close attention to the essential ingredients that help courier companies grow and improve their business and unsurprisingly one of the most significant contributors to growth is their choice of courier software.

If you are a courier or logistics company that is questioning any of your operations, whether it be for efficiency or quality of service, you’ll find this article extremely helpful in identifying a few areas where you might be held back from your full potential:

1. Poor Fleet Transparency: Do you know where every one of your drivers is right now? Many courier companies don’t! Your current courier software might be providing limited data to your fleet of drivers, causing them to miss stops and packages. If real-time updates aren’t available, you might not find out about the errors until the end of the day when your drivers complete their routes. Core features such as geofencing and the ability to store and forward data when out of cell range are critical in empowering you to manage your courier fleet properly. Above all, we believe that your Driver App should be blazing fast and easy to use. We believe that your courier software shouldn’t stop at package management either. There is detailed reporting within the Driver App that gives you insights into your business, allowing you to make better decisions about driver performance so that you can dispatch with confidence. Finally, as the industry changes, you’ll also see new opportunities to hire outside drivers from qualified platforms like Loadchief. Thankfully, our latest integration with them allows you to easily include external drivers into your workflow, something not quickly done through other courier software or even offline workflows! With over 50,000 downloads from drivers and 24/7 usage you can rest assured that our Driver App and its flexibility to be customized precisely to your business needs will be the backbone of your fleet. 

2. Limited Features: Most courier software providers offer features such as white labeling, but many courier companies are forced to pay extra money each month for such a critical branding tool. Even worse, it’s usually not just a little extra money, but instead, a lot! You might have to increase your courier software plan to an altogether higher tier to get one or two of the features you need most. The painful jump to a higher tier is because most courier software providers don’t itemize the features for you to add one by one. Here at CXT Software, we’ve identified white labeling as a courier software feature critical to your business, so we include it on all plans. In fact, we’ve doubled down on this belief and recently rolled out multi-brand white labeling within our courier software so that we can empower you to meet your customers with the right brand every time. It’s not just white labeling, though. Even in our most affordable courier software plan, we offer hundreds of features that other courier software providers usually put behind an additional paywall. Check out this page if you’d like to explore some of our detailed features.

3. Lack of Real Courier Software Support: At first instinct, you might choose the cheapest courier software or the first one you find when you search online. One item that is easy to overlook when shopping for courier software is the amount of real-time support the courier software provider gives. Here’s an easy self-test you can perform: Spend one month paying close attention to your daily operations and ask yourself how much you are being slowed down every time you have to look in a manual or documentation to figure out how to use a specific courier software feature. Even worse, how many features does your courier software have that you don’t know about because you never received proper training and support? We want you to be empowered to focus on what you do best, which is why we offer real-time support where you can just pick up the phone and talk directly to our courier software team any time of day. Sometimes the most crucial feature of your courier software is a strong partnership with the people that work behind the scenes every day to keep it running 24/7. Don’t overlook this when considering your options. We encourage you to do a self-test to see if you are getting the best possible support from your current courier software provider.

4. Missing Integrations: How often do you find yourself doing double entries for orders that come in from your shipping partners? Or, manually sending email updates for order statuses that need to be communicated to an end recipient? If this is happening to you, it could be a big sign that your courier software is holding you back. The ability to integrate seamlessly with your business partners will allow you to free up valuable time in your day and provide a faster and more reliable data feed to your courier customers. When you are doing work for a shipper, the ability to notify them or their consignee directly about their shipment in an agnostic way is essential. Sometimes the shipper will handle the communication to the consignee, which means logistics data must be collected and transmitted upstream. Other times the shipper wants you to send the notification directly to the consignee. Whichever method is preferred, supporting the ability to gather essential logistics data and disperse it through multiple requested channels is critical in your path to growth and improved service. These real-time communications are made possible through our detailed API Integration, something that many courier software providers either don’t provide or put behind a higher package tier to incentivize you to pay more. We believe that fast and seamless communication between shippers and carriers is essential to the health of our industry, so we’ve made API Integrations available to everyone at all price tiers of our courier software. Even further, this powerful API integration can be easily paired with our real-time support, so that you have all of the necessary tools and knowledge needed to set up connections with your shipping partners.

5. Confusing or Limited Training: When was the last time you received real hands-on training for the courier software that you use? We can tell you that one of our customers received training just this morning and said, “Great Explanations. Like The tutorials. Like a hands-on experience!” They are referring to our highly detailed courier software virtual learning platform. Our interactive learning library is the product of our belief that everyone should be empowered to use their courier software in a way that meets their business needs. We guide you through customizations, API integrations, operations management, and of course, host daily Q&A’s that allow you to talk directly with our team about your specific implementation.

6. Limited Reporting: How quickly can you identify your total profit per shipment each day? How would you like to automatically have that data emailed to you for quick insights? These simple reporting customizations allow you to build out your business with the visibility and reporting that you need to make the right decisions to grow. You could be missing critical business data if you can’t use your courier software to create customized reports that fit your needs. Many courier software providers offer limited or rigid reporting, or their customization is complicated and hard to use. We’ve worked for over two decades to refine and improve our custom reporting system within our courier software so that you can get the data you need.  And if what we have is still not enough, then you can use our open API to integrate with many of the robust reporting tools available on the market today. 

Whether you are a small courier company ready to hire new drivers or a large provider looking to expand into new territories, we are determined to help you succeed with our courier software that has been designed to meet your unique needs. We’ve been fine-tuning and strengthening this robust courier software suite for over two decades and are proud of the courier and logistics companies all over North America that trust it to run their business.

If you are interested in learning more and receiving a free, personalized demo, you can schedule one here: Request Demo, or call us anytime at (602) 265-0195.