Name: Webinar: From visibility to impact
Uploaded: 2026-04-22T19:16:26.015Z
Duration: 34 min 28 s
Description: Webinar: From visibility to impact

Transcript for "Webinar: From visibility to impact": Hi, everyone. I'm Karen Silver. I'm the VP of digital commercialization here at FedEx and excited to be with you today. Hey, guys. Stephanie Cannon, VP of digital VoIP IT here at FedEx. I'm excited to be here as well. Alright. So today's supply chain reality, why is visibility isn't translating into actions? One of the things that we definitely know is from our logistics report is that 97% of decision makers agree they can track every shipment from origin delivery. What 43% of leaders don't feel confident about is their logistics systems are ready for what customers expect next. I was speaking to a customer the other day, and they mentioned that they have all the data, but they aren't really able to take those next steps. And how do they action on that data? They know that transportation is one of the hugest impacts of their entire operation, but they aren't able to take that data, do something that can actually create impact to their operations, as well as their business outcomes, and then take actions to resolve those issues in real time. And, Stephanie, just further to that point, I was speaking with customers last week as well, and they similarly echoed that data is just table stakes at this point and visibility is table stakes. What really creates differentiation is the ability to take action on that data. 100%, Corinne. So the next thing really wanna talk about is, like, supply chains increasingly drive revenue growth. There's sort of three different big topics around this. One of the biggest topics is delivery promises. Right? Influence whether customers complete a purchase. I think that we've seen that as the years have evolved, especially through COVID, and and times after COVID. Right? I think what some organizations may not realize is that supply chains are more than just like the actual transportation. When they're streamlined and when they're optimized, that can be huge growth driver for somebody's company and create a lot of conversions, and repeated customers. The second one is delivery options shape competitive differentiation. Often, a way a product arrives is actually a little bit more important than, you know, the product itself. Differentiation through delivery options can really build brand loyalty for our customers, for your customers, and deliver lifetime value and and keep a customer coming back over and over. The third one here is fulfillment flexibility expands what inventory can be sold across locations and markets. Flexibility allows a business to treat its entire network as a single pool of inventory. This prevents lost sales due to local stockouts and allows brand brands to enter into new markets without massive of capital expenditure. They can take that capital and reinvest that into growth of their business. Alright. Let's talk about supply chain's performance and how that shapes margin. You know, shipment issues can actually escalate a lot of times around an organization. They create costs that maybe aren't visible all the time to people. You know, as you know, FedEx did the 2026 future logistics intelligence report. What we found out that was 87% of decision makers agree logistics supply chains inefficiencies drive significant annual cost for them and probably many different buckets. When delays occur 53% of these organizations actually report higher cost to serve their customers, which is money coming out of their pockets. And further to that point, Stephanie, I think margin erosion opportunities can be difficult to spot. Unified logistics intelligence can really help to shed light on that. Agreed. Agreed. And then inventory positioning the terms working capital efficiency. Inventory is essentially cash sitting on a shelf. Right? So where you put it and how much you keep directly indicates how much capital you have available to invest elsewhere. I think a lot of start up companies really need to be able to have that cash at hand so that they can continue to invest in their growth. On top of that, you know, exceptions and manual investigations increase labor and support cost. This is perhaps the most invisible cost of all, I would say. When a shipment goes dark or an error occurs, the labor required to fix it is a directory on profitability, and that's from an operations perspective, a transportation perspective, as well as as the customer support teams too. An additional cost that maybe aren't so obvious at first are the opportunity cost as well of your logistics team spending all day being detective trying to figure out, you know, what has gone wrong if there's a delay or an exception. Being able to automate that can really reduce the cost of labor and support. Totally agree, Brynn. Alright. Let's talk about how customers judge brands by the delivery experience. Failure to meet your customer's expectation drive spikes and where's my order, all the inquiries around that, where's my return. It puts a lot of pressure on our support teams, puts pressure on your guys' support teams. So there's some things that you can do, you know, to talk about the three different things. Customers judge brands by delivery, predictability, and reliability, not just speed. We have completely seen recently that customers don't really care about how quick does it get to them anymore like it used to be. It's really more around when is it gonna arrive. I don't care that it's gonna arrive Wednesday through Saturday. I wanna know that it's gonna arrive Friday between one and 2PM. Right? It allows that customer to allows customers to know when am I going to get my package on the day that I actually purchased the product. So when I purchased something, I may make a decision on whether I'm gonna actually purchase that product based upon the delivery promise. The second one is transparency during delivery reduces uncertainty and anxiety. Transparency is actually what causes where is my order inquiries. If you're proactive about the status, even when it's a delay, you can actually greatly reduce the customer's emotion and frustration with you, bringing back a loyal customer over and over. The third one is post purchase experiences. Right? Like, there's a significant amount of returns that happen in the industry every day. When you have transparency around your post purchase, the relationship doesn't ever end at delivery. Right? It ends sort of once you have the return, how do you actually get that, money back to that customer, and then how do you get that money back in their pocket so they can resend money with you? Where is my return is one of the major drivers of churn within, within a customer, after the point of sale. So one of the solutions that FedEx is using is a QR code printerless, option for our customers where you can go deliver that package dropped off at a Walgreens at different locations. Once you scan that QR code, it makes it very usable, and and the return is, very easily able to be tracked. And usually, the refund is is given back very quickly with a lot of, a lot of different customers. One of the things inside of our logistics report too was that, 85% high customer retention and 42% increased orders when you have a solution like that that made it easy for a return. Alright. So what is holding companies back? One of the things is is, you know, different data sources and the result of disconnected makes it impossible for customers to be transparent. A 100%, if you do not have the same data being fed through every single part of your different, you know, what I will say, operations, customer experience, and sales, you get a disjointed and a disconnected, incredibly disconnected, experience for your internal teams on how to actually handle a lot of these situations. Right? So only 43% of decision makers surveyed said all relevant teams have consistent timely access to logistics data. That's huge. You know, this is resolving in the disconnect. Right? No transparency, reliability of the delivery experience to the customer. Ultimately, that drives up your cost to serve within your within your operations. The second one is 31% site manual process is a top pain point within their operation. When you have to rely on human support teams to hunt down and track updates across disconnected carrier portals, it wastes not only, like, labor hours within your operations, it guarantees that your customers only learn about delays after the failure occurred. You want them to learn about the delays in advance and you wanna be able to keep them on top of that, keep them understanding what's going on. That is where you actually will trigger happy customers, customers that return, as well as really halt the where is my order inquiries that come in, which are huge pay points for companies. And then last one here, just 18% of teams can always intervene on delayed shipments. Without intelligence or proactive visibility tools, organizations are sort of trapped like, trapped in what I would call, like, a reactive, so they have to react once they have the information. If you can have that information in advance, have that information connected, you can be proactive. You can save at risk delivery promises, and you can avoid absorbing all of those margin eroding penalties as well. Alright. Thanks, Stephanie. Now shifting gears a bit, to talk about how to turn logistics into a competitive advantage for your company. In the study we conducted, we found that 97% of respondents felt that information and data alone was no longer enough to drive competitive advantage, but a truly actionable intelligence was key. One of the things that we wanted to discuss today was how to transform moving from visibility to logistics intelligence and the difference between logistics data and logistics intelligence. We've seen over the last several years and and months, when I was speaking to a customer last week who said the last few weeks, how much logistics intelligence has changed. This customer that I was speaking to last week said that she thought over the last few weeks that returns intelligence had significantly evolved over, like I said, the last the last few days and weeks, which was just incredible to hear. It's no longer about seeing a dot on a tracking page or seeing a tracking status update. It's much more sophisticated and evolved now. The major difference between logistics data and logistics intelligence is logistics data is very passive, whereas logistics intelligence is action oriented. Logistics data is things like tracking shipments, monitoring status, reacting to issues manually, whereas logistics intelligence is the ability to predict disruptions and course correct, to diagnose root causes, and to intervene before impact so that, you know, missed connections are not resulting in a missed delivery. Logistics intelligence, we found, can really drive growth in top line, improve your profitability, and drive better customer experiences. From a growth perspective, logistics intel intelligence can drive greater conversion on your site and also allow you to take share from competitors. Profit from a profitability perspective, logistics intelligence can reduce labor costs. It can reduce the cost of freight, overage charges, etcetera. And from a customer experience perspective, logistics intelligence can drive more delightful, meaningful, valuable customer experiences for your consumer. Yeah. And the reliability is ultimately brand builder today. Customers care more about the certainty than they do about pure speed, and and we've continued to learn that. We've heard that over the years, which is actually a shift from back in the day. Right? When logistics intelligence allows us to proactively solve the delay before the customer even notices, we don't have to save a support ticket. We actually earn a loyal customer for life. Yep. That's exactly right. Double clicking now on how logistics intelligence can fuel growth, we see AI powered predictive delivery estimates improving customer conversion rates. So everyone has been there shopping on an ecommerce website with a vague delivery window of three to five days, and that really produces anxiety and hesitation in the consumer and in the shopper, whereas high confidence, discrete delivery estimates can drive conversion and allow you to close the sale. Another driver of logistics intelligence that fuels growth is continuous improvements supporting smarter fulfillment and operational decisions. So by this, we mean the ability to see that an item is out of stock at a warehouse and change the fulfillment to ship from store, once again driving greater conversion and greater top line revenue. And then finally, we've also seen that logistics intelligence can drive growth through the ability to offer new value added delivery services, creating new revenue opportunities. So things like a white glove delivery service for a high value electronic item or, high value furniture item. Some of our customers, we see producing new revenue streams with this white glove delivery opportunity. Yeah. And if you don't mind if I add, Corinne, this is a perfect example why breaking down those data silos that we talked about earlier, is why it's so critical. You simply just can't execute on a dynamic logistics intelligence strategy without having, your online checkout systems, talking your inventory, talking to retail shops, talking to your customers. All of it has to be interconnected. That's exactly right. The second benefit we see from logistics intelligence is its ability to improve profitability. We see this in three primary forms, Lane level performance insights optimizing carrier and service selection. So if you can see the lane level performance, you can make smarter decisions from a tier and from a carrier perspective. We also see predictive signals reducing unnecessary expedited shipping costs. So that can obviously improve your profitability and by reducing your costs as well. And then finally, AI powered exception detection reducing manual investigation and intervention. Monitoring an intervention is a very costly service, especially when done manually. Being able to configure interventions and automate those processes for recovery allows you to save on your bottom line. And then finally, the last key benefit that we see from logistics intelligence perspective is around customer experience. As I mentioned earlier, dynamic estimated delivery dates build trust through data backed expectations. Just last week, I was trying to order a pair of shoes for an event that I had the coming weekend, and the website that I wanted to order from was not able to tell me that it would get there in time. So I actually ended up switching to a new retailer that was able to ensure that my delivery would come on Thursday between five and 7PM, and that's the power of driving, excellent customer experience. Automated disruption alerts and cost keep keep customers informed during delays. This is another benefit that we see for customers that really delight make delightful experiences. So being able to control the narrative because you know that a disruption is coming can be very powerful. For example, I've order I subscribe to a meal delivery service as so many of us do. When it's not gonna arrive by Friday evening, they tell me. They let me know it's not gonna be there. And that is delightful to me because then I can make alternative plans. Right? Like, it allows me to it allows them to control the narrative so that my experience has not been, detrimental. And then finally, logistics intelligence can elevate customer experience by enabling clear return tracking and personalized updates to improve the return experience. Returns is a really hot topic at the moment from a post purchase experience. We see all kinds of new services being offered. Being able to give your consumers visibility into when their refund and reimbursement or their exchange is going to hit is really powerful and drives more loyal customers. Yeah. And just to add to that, I mean, ultimately, at the end of the day, what Corinne said is is, like, how a brand handles a return is ultimately gonna dictate the lifetime of that customer for them. When not handled well, you can lose a customer for a lifetime. And it's not just about cutting those costs down. It's really about, you know, helping people understand where is my return. You know? What do I need to do with it? Like, how do I actually get that back? Yeah. That's exactly right. Alright. So let's move on. So logistics intelligence and actions is our last topic here. So logistics intelligence also require change management in the right data foundation. So it's it's not just about everything else. Like, the data has a lot to do, with the intelligence and how you action it. Alright. What leading organizations are doing differently? We talked about the change management. Right? So that is one of the biggest things that they're doing differently. But the ability to make real near time automated decisions, Organizations that are the head leaders in this, they're not waiting on humans to interact everything or approve every pivot that they need to make. They're establishing the right data foundations. That data foundation is the same amongst all of their different parts of their business so that everybody has the same data being fed to them. So they're making the same, decisions based upon that, and, they trust their systems to make real time automated decisions. The next one is integrated data and chain in the commercial teams. I sort of hit on this earlier. You cannot deliver a seamless customer experience if the team teams are looking at different data. If everybody's looking at something different, there is no way those leaders can break down those silos and actually ensure collaboration across the supply chain, customer experience teams, the commercial teams. When they have to support fulfillment, all share the same logistics intelligence. They operate on a unified front. It eliminates that friction, that happens between all the different silos or or the different and when I say silos, it breaks down the silos between all the different parts of the company, and it will drive down the cost to serve as well. The four third one here is predictive and prescriptive intelligence embedded into operational workflows. You know, ultimately, intelligence is useless if it just sits on a dashboard and nobody actually knows how to use it or they don't check-in or they don't get on. We found that, at at companies I was at before, you know, we created all these really fancy dashboards and we ended up doing one a dashboard that was like, how many people are looking at the dashboard? And we found out that, you know, not a lot of people were actually looking at those dashboards because they really didn't know how to read those or understand what was in them. So the best companies are actually embedding predictive and prescriptive intelligence directly into their operational workflows, and that is actually a key message, that everyone should try to understand. So the fourth one here, a culture that treats data as a strategic business asset is always going to be a company that's on top. Ultimately, while logistics intelligence is key to transforming visibility into action, none of this works without change management from the company. Leaders have to cultivate data as a strategic asset to the company. They have to foster the use of that. They have to embed it into their workflows. They have to create trust in that intelligence, and they have to create high quality data, in order to feed, all the different, parts of the company. And then, you know, the supply chain is the primary driver of the company's success. Alright. Real world impact. So this is a real case study with a real customer that we had. So sit this is about segment driven visibility. So first thing here is is one of the things is that faster shipment data flow. So what they did is they shifted API, which which unlock real time visibility across operational and customer service workflows. Instead of being able to populate things in seconds, or in fifteen minute intervals, they were able to do it in seconds and have that data fed back to them. That enabled them to get faster response times to their customers, and views to themselves so that they had consistency in what they saw that was happening in transit in real time. The next one is they had a 25% decrease in status check support tickets. So we provided advanced, integrated visibility, and it helped them reduce confusion around shipment timelines. It lowered the redundant status of the checks, clearer communication around the shipment and the timelines. There were now fewer discrepancies to untangle. They had given time back to customer support and boosting customer, confidence in their shippers. And then, the third one is they had a 28% reduction in infrastructure cost. Cost. This is huge huge for a company. Switching to the webhooks technology eliminated continuous pooling, reduced the strain on the technical resources. They created an efficient technical architecture by processing only the most meaningful events that they needed to actually see. This lowered their overhead, from a system perspective and their server over overhead. It also reduced their CPU usage, energy consumption, cooling needs, and maintenance demand. It led to a more environmentally friendly operation as well as lower cost for that business, which is amazing. Alright. What to prioritize now? Your priority asked you off. What do I prioritize now? What do I do to get all this? You know, a lot of the things is is it's really about having metrics. Right? You know, conversion rates, NPS, first time delivery success. Like, identifying those metrics is critical. You know, supply chain leaders have to stop measuring purely, like, freight costs when they're talking to their c suites. You have to align your KPIs with your business outcomes in order to actually talk to your c suite and get the buy in that's needed. It's not just about tracking cost per mile anymore. You need to really measure the reliability of your delivery promise, your checkout conversion, and how that boosts your post purchase, net promoter score. The next one is connect systems and data across logistics, IT, and customer experience. There's nothing worse than a tracking update being trapped in a carrier portal that does not, does not actually do anything but frustrate your customers. The organizations have to connect all of their systems. They have to have governance around their data, context around their data. They need to structure their data, and all their data needs to have good quality, and it needs to be connected amongst the logistics IT and the customer experience teams. That single source of truth, it ensures marketing support and the fulfillment teams are all operating on the same playbook. further point, Stephanie, I think the customer doesn't care how many systems or processes that you have running in the background. They just want a single seamless brand experience. So so that point is really important. Yes. A 100%. For sure. Next one is start with high impact and low friction use cases. When you're tackling, you know, what do you prioritize next, how do you get to this, like, visibility dashboards do not save delayed packages. Right? Companies that use logistics intelligence that turn the insights into faster decisions in earlier intervention, they're the ones who are actually able to, to make changes quicker. Like, the network disruption before the packages leave the facility systems can be rerouted drastically, improved first attempt delivery success, and avoid massive cost because it'll create a failed and return shipment and then also an unhappy customer at the end of the day. Right? And then I think I sort of sorry, and I apologize for this. I mixed these two up when I was talking. I skipped over one. But start with the high impact, low friction use cases. You do not have to come with some crazy tech use case in order to, to be able to do this and, you know, these can actually drive, like, significant cost doing that. You don't need to rip and replace your entire tech stack system. Like, start with these high impact, low friction use cases. Find ones that will directly drive value that you know can you can immediately drive value and it'll boost your sales. Turning exceptions automated, into proactive alerts to your customers, that is an easy quick one. It can it can stop delays. It can give the delays to your customers, advanced note note and visibility into that, and then it can slash your inbound where's my order volume. And then last, show quick wins and then scale. So transformize change, like we said earlier, a lot of change management, but it requires momentum and buy in. These low friction use cases that we talked about earlier, if you can show your supply chain leaders and your c suite that you have these quick wins, you're actually driving measurable, ROI quickly, then you can actually get buy in to scale, and scale a lot of this stuff down the line. Yeah. I don't we're not suggesting a massive overhaul of your current supply chain and logistics platform. I think what we found to be most successful is, to Stephanie's point, these targeted data driven, wins and focusing on those and then scaling accordingly. And so that is the end, and I think we're gonna move to q and a now. Alright. Can everybody hear me okay? Hey there. Sorry about that. I had a brief camera issue. I don't know what was going on there, but it looks like everything is okay now. So, we do have questions that have come in. I realized that we're at the top of the thirty minutes here, so I don't wanna take too much time for everyone. So we'll keep it a little bit limited. If we don't get to your question today, don't worry about it every we'll make reach out via email. So the first question that we have here is, this individual already has shipment visibility today, but they want a recap of what the real difference is between visibility and intelligence. Stephanie, is that something that you can cover for me? Sure. So shipment visibility in general, what a lot of people have had is is simply just telling you where the package is located at that time, right, wherever the last scan was. Logistics intelligence, actually analyzes the location. It will predict your delays. It prescribes solutions. It gives automated actions. It keeps your supply chain moving. It can give you insights on how to make decisions or how to notify your customers. There's a lot of different things that the intelligence will do versus just telling you, like, hey. Here's my package. Got it. Thank you. That's wonderful. Alright. This person would like to dive in a little bit more on how customer expectations are changing on delivery and post purchase experiences. Crayon, I know you touched on that a little bit. Could you, add in there? Yeah. Happy to happy to go deeper there. I actually hosted a dinner last week with several ecommerce leaders at major retailers, and this was such a hot topic. I think customers in 2026 are just have such high expectations post purchase, and they just want hyper transparency. They wanna know where their delivery is in real time. They wanna be able to act on it. They wanna be able to reroute it if possible. They wanna know the condition of their order right up until it hits their doorstep. And I think that that's, you know, the expectations in 2026 are just, you know, sky high for for shippers and for product carriers alike. Got it. Wonderful. Okay. We have time for two more questions here. The next one here is going back to, using data. So what are the biggest obstacles preventing companies from actually acting on their logistics data? And, Stephanie, I do think you covered this. Can we go back to you again? Yeah. Yeah. So this is all geared back to that siloed data. Right? A lot of people's systems systems are trapped in those siloed. Everybody's getting information from different sources. What I will say is is you have to standardize your data across your entire network and across your entire company. So how do you bring that data together? How do you govern that data? How do you create context around that data? And then how do you actually take that data and ensure that every single person that is using that data actually has the right data, the right insights, and is able to be able to use that data in the same way, and it's the same source of truth. Okay. I got it. Alright. One final question here, and this one is actually coming from me. And I'm gonna direct it at Corinne. So Corinne, if attendees only get one thing out of today's session, what key takeaway would you recommend? Alright. Thanks, Rebecca. I think the single most important thing to leave you with today is that raw data without automated execution is really just noise. Logistics intelligence is so key now and using your supply chain to make intelligent decisions and to drive operational outcomes is is so key to driving competitive differentiation, driving growth, reducing, reducing costs and driving profitability and ultimately driving better customer experiences and more loyal customers ultimately. Okay. Well, thank you so much, and, this has been a wonderful webinar. I think it's time to wrap things up for today. You know, I've done a lot of webinars and what I always enjoy is that I've learned a lot. So thank you Stephanie and Corinne for sharing all of your knowledge with me. I hope everybody else also really enjoyed this session. As a reminder, this was recorded. We will send this out to everyone on demand, that will be today that you'll see that in your inbox. We will have additional webinars in the future. Our next one up is in June, and we're going to dive into the post purchase journey a little bit. So keep your eye out for that webinar. We'd love to see you on our next one. And, again, Stephanie and Kryn, thank you so much. I really appreciate this, and I hope everyone else had a great time. Bye, y'all.