Freight customer onboarding workflow

Direct answer

Onboard a new shipper by creating one complete account record before the first enquiry is handled. Capture the company and its contacts by role, record the commercial terms that were agreed, set lane and mode defaults, note document preferences, decide who gets notifications or portal access, run a test enquiry through the process, and then hand the account from sales to operations with a clear summary. Anything you learn later is added to the same record, not to someone's inbox.

This page is about the account setup. The wider customer system is covered in CRM implementation for freight forwarders, and the self-service side in the freight forwarder customer portal. Checks on who the customer is, such as identity, sanctions, credit standing or legal review, sit with your compliance, finance and legal staff. This workflow only gives those checks a place in the process.

One account record, several contacts

A shipper is rarely one person. Purchasing agrees terms, a logistics coordinator sends booking requests, accounts payable receives invoices, and a warehouse contact handles collection. If all of them are one name in one field, messages go to the wrong people and invoices land with someone who cannot pay them.

Create the account first, then attach contacts with a role each: commercial, operational, documentation, finance, and an escalation contact. Record preferred channel and language where it matters. Record which contacts are authorised to confirm bookings or approve quotes, since acting on an instruction from someone who is not authorised is a real operational risk.

• Legal entity name and trading name, as the customer gives them.
• Billing and delivery addresses, kept separate from each other.
• Contacts by role, with the authorised approvers marked.
• Owner on your side, both for sales and for day-to-day operations.

Commercial terms as recorded decisions

The terms themselves, such as payment terms, quote validity practice and any special conditions, are decisions your business makes with the customer. The workflow does not set them. Its job is to make sure that whatever was agreed is written on the account in a place everyone can see it.

Record each term with the date it was agreed and who agreed it on both sides, and link the source, such as the signed agreement or the confirming email. When operations or finance later ask what was agreed, the answer is on the account, not in the memory of the person who negotiated it. If terms change, add the new one with its date and keep the previous entry for reference.

Lane and mode defaults

Most shippers use a fairly stable set of origins, destinations and modes. Record these as defaults on the account so a new enquiry starts with the likely values already filled in and only needs confirming. Typical examples are usual pickup locations, usual consignees, common modes and any routing they have said they prefer or avoid.

Defaults are a convenience, not an assumption. The person handling an enquiry confirms each value, and the record should show it was confirmed. Treat cargo that falls outside the usual pattern as a prompt for a question, not something to fit into the closest default. Notes about the cargo itself, such as handling requirements the customer has told you about, belong on the account too, marked as customer-stated.

Document preferences

Customers differ in what they want to receive and in what shape. Some want every document by email as it is issued, some want a weekly pack, some want everything in a portal. Record who gets which document, in which format and language, and whether they need copies for a bank, a broker or their own customer.

Record documents you must receive from them as well, and how they normally supply them. This turns into the checklist used by shipment document tracking, so the expectation is set on day one and not discovered when a document is missing before departure. What each document legally has to contain is a matter for the customer and their advisers, not for this record.

Notification and portal access

Decide up front who should be told what. A contact might receive booking confirmations, another might receive delay notices, a third only invoices. Record these choices per contact, so a change in staff at the customer is a single edit rather than a hunt through mailing lists.

If the customer will use a portal, set up each user individually with only the shipments and functions they need, and record who approved the access on the customer's side. Remove access promptly when the customer tells you someone has left. Nothing here should be sent automatically without a person on your team having reviewed the setup, especially the first messages a new customer receives.

Run a test enquiry

Before the customer's first real request, push a test enquiry through the process using the account as configured. Check that the right contacts are pulled in, the defaults appear, the terms are visible to whoever prepares the quote, and the document checklist is the one you agreed. It is a quick way to find a wrong email address or a missing default before it costs anything.

Mark the test data clearly so it never appears in reporting or gets mistaken for a live shipment, and remove it once the check is done. Where the test shows a gap, fix the account and repeat the part that failed.

Handoff from sales to operations

The moment a deal is won is the moment information is most likely to be lost. The handoff should be a short summary generated from the account, not a fresh email: who the contacts are and who approves, the terms agreed, expected lanes and modes, document and notification preferences, anything unusual the customer said, and the checks that compliance or finance still need to complete.

Operations confirms receipt and lists questions. Sales stays reachable until the first shipment completes. Record the first shipment as the point where onboarding is closed, so an account that was created but never used stays visible in a report and does not quietly linger as if it were active.