“Our mission is to help our customers – big and small – manage their global supply chains with greater agility and effi ciency,” said Vincent Clerc, Chief Commercial Offi cer at Maersk. “We need to provide customers not just with visibility but actionabilty.”
Maersk Line is already blazing a trail in actionabilty with its Remote Container Management initiative, which enables customers to monitor the conditions of their cargo while in transit. “By leveraging the Internet of Things, we can empower our customers to take decisions and actions that safeguard the quality of their products,” revealed Clerc.
Maersk Line is the world’s largest container shipping company. From blueberries and bricks to cars and clothes, it helps its customers bring their products to new markets and achieve their ambitions. “We want to transform our business to fi t around our customers’ needs instead of our assets by delivering a more personalised experience,” said Clerc.
To learn more about its customers as well as their behaviours and goals, Maersk Line also needed to give its customer and operational data a voice. And that meant becoming a fully digital business.
“Customer interactions are a goldmine of information,” said Peter Hartz, Senior Director of Customer Experience and Service at Maersk. “The more we digitalise the customer journey, the more data we can capture and analyse.”
By centralising its sales, customer services, and marketing activities onto a single platform, Maersk Line can not only tap into this data goldmine but also accelerate its digital roadmap. “Salesforce enables our teams to interact more seamlessly and access a common view of our customers. It has transformed the way we engage and encouraged greater synchronicity across the business,” said Dave Strain, Head of Commercial Projects and IT Portfolio at Maersk.
The shipping giant’s Salesforce journey began around 2010 when digitalisation had yet to become a business gamechanger. “For us, the initial driver was to create a single platform for tracking customer information and interactions,” said Strain. That might sound like a simple goal, but when you have 59,000 customers, 33,000 employees, and 300 offi ces, it’s a massive undertaking. But as Trailblazers, the leadership team at Maersk Line rose to the challenge – and achieved it.
“We have a long history and a proud heritage but a lack of visibility was holding us back,” said Clerc. “Salesforce has opened up new horizons for me, and helped the business raise the bar. We are setting the new standard in the shipping industry.”
This new standard isn’t just founded on greater visibility; it’s also founded on greater consistency and effi ciency. “In some countries, we used to receive up to 20 emails from a customer per shipment,” revealed Hartz. “Shipping cargo around the world can come with a lot of complexity and uncertainty. Our goal is to make things as easy as possible for our customers.”
