About the project
Nordfracht handles groupage and part loads between the port of Hamburg and Central Europe, with 34 employees and a fleet of long-standing subcontractors. Rate requests arrived by email, fax and phone in every conceivable format, and a dispatcher spent an average of nineteen minutes turning each one into a quote. Two of the three dispatchers were close to retirement, and the knowledge lived in their heads. We built a customer portal with a structured request form, an internal quoting tool that reads unstructured email requests and pre-fills them, and a documented process the next generation of dispatchers can actually learn. Average quote turnaround went from nineteen minutes to four, and the firm now answers requests overnight without staffing a night shift.
Gallery
What we did
Development
The customer portal lets forwarders and shippers submit a request with dimensions, incoterms, hazardous goods class and pickup window in a single form, then track the resulting quote and booking. Internally we built a quoting tool on top of their existing tariff tables, so dispatchers keep working with numbers they trust. Everything is auditable and exports cleanly into their transport management system.
AI Automation
Requests that still arrive as free-text email are parsed automatically: origin, destination, weight, loading metres and deadline are extracted and pushed into the quoting tool as a draft. Anything the parser is unsure about is flagged rather than guessed. Overnight requests receive an automatic acknowledgement with an indicative corridor and a firm quote by 08:30.
Accompaniment
We maintain the parser against changing customer email formats, tune the tariff logic when fuel surcharges shift, and run a quarterly session with the dispatch team to collect friction points. Since 2023 the system has had one unplanned outage, lasting eleven minutes.
Results in numbers
19 → 4 min
average quote turnaround
+27%
quote-to-booking conversion
99.98%
portal uptime since launch
What they say about us
I have been in forwarding for 28 years and I have seen a lot of software promised to us. This is the first system my dispatchers asked to keep using after the pilot ended. It does not try to be cleverer than the people operating it — when it is unsure, it says so, and that is exactly why they trust it.
Services used
- Website developmentFast, secure websites your team can update without a developer.
- AI voice agents (AI telephony)Every call answered in German, at midnight and during the rush.
- Advertising supportYour campaigns watched, adjusted and reported every single week.
- Testing of sites and applicationsFind the bugs before your customers and your reviews do.
Your contact person
Miriam Kraus
I read every request personally and get back to you within one business day.