U.S. Xpress

The Customer 

When leading truckload transportation company U.S. Xpress set out to modernise its IT infrastructure, it needed a CRM system that could deliver a single view of customer information across all its divisions and affiliates. U.S. Xpress is one of the largest for-hire common carriers in the United States, with over $1.7 billion in revenue, managing a portfolio of transportation services and regional affiliate companies across North America. 

The Challenge

As the company grew and diversified its service offerings, it was apparent that its legacy CRM system was not able to provide the functionality and flexibility the organisation needed. 

Our legacy system was 13 years old and so heavily customised that we were tied to our vendor for support and unable to upgrade the solution. In addition, it had no connectivity to any of our data, and to establish that connectivity would have been a massive undertaking.

Leadership knew it wanted a CRM solution beyond simple data access, to give people tools to support end-to-end business processes, from strategic account planning and bidding for new accounts to sales, rating, billing and operations. Armed with that kind of deep data insight, the company could take a much more holistic approach to how it bid and closed new business. 

The highly fragmented trucking industry has very low closure rates. Each year, we price around $75 billion in freight and close about $1.7 billion of that. Being able to both better understand our customers and automate the entire sales process can have an enormous impact.

Deals in the transportation business can be big and complex, with long sales cycles and a huge amount of data to sift through to land the right business mix from a bid. Different U.S. Xpress affiliates were often bidding on the same business, making it difficult to coordinate bids, and customer meetings required a huge amount of preparation. There was not very good visibility into customer data or into the sales pipeline, and sales representatives were spending countless hours assembling data and reports from multiple departments. As Poulos notes, this resulted in „tens of thousands of dollars in lost opportunities per salesperson per year, because salespeople spent time finding information rather than selling.“ 

The Solution

U.S. Xpress considered several CRM solutions but eventually settled on a Microsoft Dynamics CRM implementation customised by Hitachi Solutions to meet its business needs. The combination of powerful sales force automation, deep data access and reporting, and ease of use were winners. 

For our salespeople, in particular, the fact that Microsoft Dynamics CRM worked through Microsoft Outlook made it a great fit and helped us adopt it with greater ease. It also fit with our existing Microsoft infrastructure, and we felt that we could avoid having to heavily customise it to meet our needs.

All of the company’s financial and logistical data is stored in its AS/400 ERP system, and with tight integration between this system and CRM, the sales team gained streamlined processes for pricing, quoting and responding to customer RFPs. When a new prospect is identified, the sales team immediately captures it in CRM and an associated billing record is created in the ERP system. Tasks associated with preparing quotes are automatically routed by workflow so the team can deliver accurate quotes quickly, and when a sale is made, the customer and account records are automatically updated in both the ERP and CRM systems. 

When sales staff are out in the field with customers, they can quickly route requests for quotes back to our pricing team. A manager can then view a queue of all incoming requests and distribute those out to our pricing analysts, based on a range of criteria such as the value of the deal or even an analyst’s workload.

Why Hitachi Solutions

U.S. Xpress chose Microsoft Dynamics CRM, customised by Hitachi Solutions, for its powerful sales force automation, deep data access and reporting, and ease of use, and because it fit the company’s existing Microsoft infrastructure with minimal customisation. Crucially, it put business intelligence directly in the hands of the people who needed it. 

Where Microsoft Dynamics CRM really beat the competition was when it came to providing business intelligence to the people across our company. Our people could create the dashboards and reports they needed to really take charge of their own destiny and do so with little to no involvement from the IT department.

The Benefits 

With CRM providing a single view of customer information along with automated workflows for core business processes, U.S. Xpress is able to run more efficiently and be more effective. Reduced prep time for sales calls alone saves the company as much as $350,000 a year in lost-opportunity costs, improved sales productivity and reduced IT support costs amount to tens of thousands of dollars more in annual savings, and improved closure rates make the company stronger and more competitive. With the CRM upgrade, U.S. Xpress extended CRM to more teams and business units, including its newer brokerage division, so divisions can work together to offer a compelling mix of services including dedicated contract carriage, irregular route one-way services and on-demand brokered services. 

When we have multiple divisions contacting the customer on different timescales, for different types of contracts or services, we’re able to ensure our sales force speaks with one voice.

Alongside the upgrade, U.S. Xpress implemented a comprehensive bid management solution to help its divisions deliver better quotes, faster, with unified data preventing affiliates from cross-bidding with the same customer. The clearest single gain was in recovering lost-opportunity costs: before Microsoft Dynamics CRM, salespeople spent as many as seven hours preparing for a customer meeting, whereas now that information is a report that takes up to 90 seconds to run. 

Over the course of the year, each salesperson was applying around $10,000 worth of their time gathering customer information. Now, with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, we have that time back, know our customers even better than before, and can reapply the lost-opportunity costs of around $350,000 to reach out to new prospects.

Because Microsoft Dynamics CRM works together with the AS/400 ERP system, staff now have a single view of the customer and managers have unprecedented insight into the business. 

With Microsoft Dynamics CRM, we’re now able to have that executive-level conversation. We can go through our pipeline and see what sales calls we have made, what calls are in the pipeline, and then drill down into those activities and see what our estimated wallet share is with that customer and who we are competing with.

What’s Next? 

With CRM now extended across more teams and business units and unified data spanning its divisions, U.S. Xpress is positioned to keep coordinating its customer engagement as a single, joined-up business. As Davis puts it, „now, with one source for company information, our management and support teams can operate as one, improving our execution and responsiveness to our customer needs and improving those relationships overall.“