The most common customer question in a forwarding company has four words: "Where is my shipment?" It arrives by phone, by mail, sometimes through the portal. Every chatbot vendor has a slide for it. Almost none has the answer, because the answer does not live in the chatbot. It lives in the telematics, the TMS and the advance notice.
That is the position of this piece: a chatbot in freight forwarding is the last process, not the first. It pays in one clearly defined case, and in most companies the better answer is not a conversation but a notice that arrives before the question does.
To answer "Where is my shipment?" it needs three things: the shipment (from the TMS, with customer and reference), the vehicle's position (from telematics, every 15 minutes) and the expected arrival (from comparing both with the time slot). These are exactly the data the arrival notice service produces anyway. The case study describes how.
Without that service the bot answers: "Please contact our dispatch team." That is a phone call with a detour.
At a forwarder with 40 trucks we did not answer the question. We removed it. The service notifies customer and dispatch 30 minutes before the dock, and again if the arrival shifts by more than 15 minutes. The customer does not ask, because he already knows. Dispatch only calls when something really goes wrong.
That is the order: first the notice, then tracking for those who want to look themselves, and only then, if the volume justifies it, a bot.
There is a case. A company with many occasional customers, consumers or consignees who get no notice because nobody has their address. If hundreds of similar requests arrive there every day, a bot is the right recipient. It reads the shipment number from the question, fetches status and arrival from the same service as the notice, and answers in one sentence. If it cannot read the number or find the shipment, it hands over to a person, with the conversation so far.
Technically that is the same build as all our services: the language model reads and phrases, deterministic code fetches the data, a protocol per request shows what the bot answered and what it handed over. The watchdog counts answered requests, not conversations.
In our experience the line where this pays sits at about 50 similar requests a day. Below that, tracking in the portal is cheaper, and regular customers are used to it anyway.
Three things that appear in chatbot offers and cause harm in forwarding:
The Logistics Benchmark 2025 checked 54 logistics companies in December. 55 percent offer a customer portal, 20 percent one with real functional value. A bot in front of a portal without function is a second portal without function.
A caveat: the 50-requests line is our experience from forwarders with regular customers. Parcel services and consumer business have different volumes, and there the bot is often the first process. That is not our field.
How many "Where is my shipment?" requests does your dispatch get a day, and how many from regular customers? Tell me the two numbers. I will tell you whether the notice or the bot comes first at your company. Ask for a process check: 30 minutes, no sales pitch.
