American Expediting ups productivity by 3X with Zendesk

When every second counts and safety is on the line, American Expediting delivers with confidence. Backed by 40 years of expertise, American Expediting provides highly specialized services from cold-chain logistics to urgent same-day ground transport for its life science partners. Whether transporting medications and equipment, or delivering organs for transplant surgeries, the company is improving lives one critical shipment at a time.

“We are one of the few national companies focused on life sciences, so we are literally part of the supply chain that saves people’s lives,” says Kirk Serjeanston, Chief Information Officer (CIO) at American Expediting. He was inspired to join a company with such a unique mission and critical impact, after years of working for electronics and fashion e-commerce businesses.

Supporting growth through digital CX

American Expediting has seen tremendous growth through acquisitions and now has over 2,000 independent contract drivers, serving customers throughout the United States and Canada.

When Serjeanston came on board a year ago, he saw a dire need for a CX transformation since the company had nearly quadrupled in size. “The core group was still doing things the old way and using outdated processes that might work for a smaller company. But at a certain size, you have to get more efficient,” he says. “All of the processes needed to be updated to a more digital, automated environment.”

One of the biggest challenges Serjeanston encountered was that “American Expediting has a very complex process for dealing with customers because there’s a lot of manual work that comes in by phone and email. It all has to be consolidated and threaded into a single entity or ticket to resolve.”

The Operations team had been using a complicated Outlook engagement process with customers, which Serjeanston described as “a digital baton that went from person to person to work the order.” After an attempt to create tickets using eGain, the team found that software wasn’t sophisticated enough to handle the nuances of their organization either.

Zendesk technology delivers

With complex healthcare logistics and lifesaving deliveries on the line, American Expediting needed a robust and reliable solution. The company signed up with Zendesk in January 2023 and had the platform up and running within three months.

Currently, 150 customer service representatives use the Zendesk Suite Enterprise, out of 400 to 500 total employees in Operations. American Expediting also set up an external help center called the Care Center, and an internal IT help desk on Zendesk.

“The living knowledge base in Zendesk provides everything we need to service customers properly at our fingertips. That has helped us train new people quickly and help them understand the nuances of each customer,” adds Serjeanston, who is pleased with the solution as a whole. “Zendesk has a good reputation and offers a broad set of technology. It’s more than just a ticketing system, it’s a way to serve customers.”

49% faster orders with round-robin ticketing

The Customer Care team uses Zendesk to handle 88,000 monthly tickets, totaling more than one million tickets per year. With that high volume, Serjeanston has seen “A lot of the benefits come from the round-robin ticketing, where multiple people work a single order and we get real-time updates. Things are just so much easier and faster in Zendesk, so customers get quicker and more thorough answers than in the past.”

With Zendesk, American Expediting has seen a 49 percent reduction in time per order, from 43 minutes down to 22 minutes. The team’s new goal is 12 to 16 minutes per order.

100% integration with Zendesk

Guided by Zendesk Premier Support professional services, the team also integrated Zendesk with HubSpot CRM, Microsoft Outlook, Amazon Connect for phone support, e-Courier for transportation management, a visualization tool for dispatch, and a QA system.

“It’s our contact center as a service, so any tool that a Care Center representative needs to service the customer is one-hundred percent integrated into Zendesk,” Serjeanston explains. “There’s a level of flexibility that you don’t get in other systems.”

Even if the team gets five emails about a single order, “We can use an API to integrate Outlook emails and thread them together in Zendesk as one order, so the care center agent can track each movement.”

Serjeanston continues, “We’re able to centralize a lot of our functions using Zendesk APIs. Instead of going from system to system to get information, we now have a window into the various systems all in one screen. It allows agents to work faster and respond quicker to customers.”

Better reporting builds transparency

American Expediting executives, team members, and customers all benefit from the data and insights provided by Zendesk.

“Suddenly, we had reporting and analytics on the business that we’d never had before and it changed everything,” recalls Serjeanston. “We got clarity on all the different aspects of managing the customer and how we could improve productivity.”

Tracking shipment details and sharing highlights with customers is now a breeze. “We can provide better data reporting now, because there are prepared reports coming out of Zendesk that easily show customers how we’re doing,” says Serjeanston. “We also take data from Zendesk and put it where customers can grab their own reports and self-serve. That transparency creates a stronger partnership.”

A difference customers can see

Using Zendesk has empowered agents to achieve a threefold increase in productivity and answer 96 percent of tickets in one touch.

“Customers sometimes ask, ‘What’s changed? Did you hire more people?’ And we say, ‘Nope, we just put Zendesk in.’ We chose Zendesk because we want to spend more time making sure every shipment is perfect instead of spending time taking and entering orders,” remarks Serjeanston.

Providing reliable service is an important way to build trust with customers awaiting urgent deliveries. “There’s a real positive quality aspect to what we’re doing for customers now, because we know where we can focus to make things happen faster. We can give more visibility on saving someone’s life,” says Serjeanston.

Premium customer experiences drive growth

Cold-chain logistics and organ transport is more complicated than a typical e-commerce shipment, because American Expediting has to pack the organ in dry ice, give alerts on the temperature throughout the shipment process, then gather and submit necessary paperwork. Serjeanston is proud of the team’s progress when it comes to supporting these mission-critical deliveries.

“We’re getting the right tools to be more surgical about providing a better customer experience,” he says. “Everything gets facilitated within Zendesk to make sure specific activities happen in the right time frame.”

As customers see American Expediting do well in certain markets, it helps drive new business. “Customers have given us a lot of new markets since the Zendesk implementation just because of our ability to answer questions and get things done on time,” shares Serjeanston. “Using Zendesk and providing a great customer experience has been an important part of our growth.”