Two things eat a logistics office. One is people asking where their shipment is. The other is quote requests that arrive with half the information missing, requiring three emails before anyone can put a number on anything.
Neither requires judgement. Both consume the working day of people whose actual job is moving freight.
Status chasing, and the honest answer
The instinct is to point a chatbot at tracking. The honest position is more limited than that, and worth stating plainly.
Live shipment status sits in your TMS. Unless the bot is connected to it, it cannot tell anyone where a container is, and a model reasoning its way to an answer about someone's freight is a serious problem. Configure it not to try.
What it can do is more useful than it sounds:
Explain how to track, and hand over the reference format so people stop pasting the wrong number. Explain what a status actually means, since "in transit" and "at origin depot" produce a lot of confused calls. Explain what typically happens next and how long that stage usually takes. Set the expectation for when an exception gets updated.
A large share of chasing calls are not really requests for information. They are requests for reassurance from someone who does not understand the process. Answering the process question removes the call.
For anything genuinely exceptional, a delayed load, a damaged pallet, a missed collection, it should route to a person immediately with the reference captured.
Quotes that arrive priceable
The other half of the problem is fixable outright.
A freight quote needs a fixed set of inputs, and customers rarely supply them unprompted. A bot asks for all of them, in order, while the enquirer is still engaged:
- Collection and delivery postcodes or ports
- Dimensions and weight, and whether that is per item or total
- Number of pallets or pieces, and whether stackable
- What the commodity is
- Required collection date and any delivery deadline
- Whether a tail lift, forklift, or timed slot is needed
- Any hazardous classification
Seven or eight questions, answered in a few minutes, and your commercial team opens a message they can price rather than a message they have to interrogate.
The dimensions question is worth special attention because it is where most quoting errors originate. Asking explicitly whether the figures are per item or for the consignment removes a category of dispute that turns up later as a rebill.
New business arrives at inconvenient hours
Shippers researching carriers do it around their own operational day, which for anyone importing means the middle of your night.
Those enquiries deserve different handling from a one-off quote. What a bot should establish is whether this is a repeat flow: what lanes, what frequency, what volume, and what they use currently. A shipper moving weekly volume on a lane you already run is a materially different opportunity from someone shipping one pallet, and the two should not land in the same queue.
Capture it, flag it, and route it to whoever owns new accounts.
Customs, and what not to say
Anything involving duty, tariff classification, restricted goods, or documentation requirements is a category where a wrong answer creates a stuck shipment and a liability.
The bot can explain your process, what documents you need from a shipper, what your customs team handles, and typical timings. It must not state a duty rate, assign a commodity code, or confirm whether something can be imported. Those go to a person, every time, and the instruction should be explicit.
The same applies to insurance limits and liability. Point at the published terms and route the specifics.
The internal use worth considering
Most logistics chatbot conversations are external, but there is a second application that tends to get overlooked: your own people.
Drivers and warehouse staff ask the same questions constantly. What is the procedure for a refused delivery. Who authorises an overnight. What do I do with a damaged pallet. Where is the form for that. Pointed at your operating procedures, the same tool answers those without anyone ringing the transport office mid-shift.
That is a quieter win than lead capture, and in a business running on thin margins and thinner staffing, it may be the larger one.
Configuration notes
Point it at your services, lane coverage, terms, and any published transit times. Upload the terms and conditions, since liability and claims questions are frequent and the detail sits there.
Write two rules first: never state a live shipment status, and never give customs or classification guidance. Then set the quote capture fields, with the per-item-or-total clarification built in.
Route exceptions and anything involving a claim straight to a human, with urgency flagged.
Judging it
Two things worth counting. How many quote enquiries your team can price without a follow-up email, and how much of your inbound status chasing survives.
The first frees commercial capacity. The second frees operational capacity. In freight, both are usually in shorter supply than the trucks.