Yellow Freight tries freeing agents for upselling, consulting Yellow Freight System Inc., an Overland Park, KS-based trucking freight consolidator, has added speech recognition and live-voice chats with online customers as it continues to automate its teleservices operations.
The $2 billion firm consolidates freight deliveries by truck, air and railroad for multiple customers and from multiple locations in what’s known as the less-than-load market. The company is looking to add greater efficiency to its operations and possibly cut overhead costs through these efforts, says Paul Marshall, Yellow Freight’s senior director of customer service support.
One such initiative involves trying to move customers with simple transactions or questions to self-service. This would allow Yellow Freight agents to deal with more complicated customer issues in a more consultative role, and try to upsell such services as expedited delivery.
Yellow Freight is also upgrading the speech recognition functions on its teleservices system.
The firm’s inbound calls are processed entirely by its automated phone-tree system, which currently serves about 20% of its customers. Phone-tree systems route callers to the appropriate company officials through a series of recorded questions and button pushings.
Right now, Yellow Freight uses speech recognition – which allows users to use their own voices – for taking orders for pick-ups and providing tracking information on delivery status. Yellow Freight plans to add more applications as customers become more comfortable with using the system for self-service.
Yellow Freight is following the same model with online media as it uses with inbound calls, by designing self-service systems for its Web site (www.yellowfreight.com). But it always gives customers the option of communicating with a live agent. Agents at Yellow Freight already can communicate with customers using e-mail, text-chat and online instant messaging.
As with its phone-tree recorded information, Yellow Freight is encouraging customers to use its Web site to obtain basic information, track deliveries and conduct routine or simple transactions. Yellow Freight currently handles 480,000 to 500,000 Web site inquiries and transactions per month.
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