At Parnity’s inaugural Forwarders Online Conference, CEO Guilherme Luz interviewed IAG Cargo’s SME Growth and Development Manager Jemma Cross and Head of Marketing and External Communications Matthew Gardiner.
During the “In conversation with IAG Cargo” virtual session, Guilherme explored topics including IAG Cargo’s SME strategy and how the business is embracing technology and digitalisation, as well as the business’ Constant Climate and Critical products.
The event was attended by over 100 freight forwarders worldwide and a number of air cargo carriers. Questioned on IAG Cargo’s SME strategy, Jemma said: “IAG Cargo recognises the value that SMEs play within the airfreight market and is focusing on building our strategy to support this customer sector.”
Jemma went on to talk about a number of core initiatives including IAG Cargo’s award-winning loyalty programme FORWARD.REWARDS, the partnership efforts and focus on digitalisation. She highlighted that FORWARD.REWARDS “was specifically designed to cater for our SME customers” and that “the beauty of the scheme is that as customers grow with IAG Cargo, we ramp up the points ratio for every euros spent.“
On digitalisation, Matthew explained that “it is key to our interactions with small forwarders. Digitalisation and automation allows us to add value and support those customers in a way that perhaps wasn’t previously possible. From a digitalisation perspective it’s important to look at the whole customer journey and that’s what we’re doing at IAG Cargo. Building a good customer experience doesn’t happen by accident. It happens by design. We’ve done a lot of work with regards to acquisition and on-boarding which is paying dividends.”
Guilherme was also keen to explore the air cargo industry’s shift towards e-booking, questioning what it takes to migrate and pivot to becoming an e-commerce business, probing the team on the challenges and opportunities of delivering channel shift.
Matthew said that “the biggest challenge, if you want to become an e-commerce business, is that you need to act, think and behave like an e-commerce business. It’s not just about hiring loads of developers. It’s about delivering a cultural change that enables you to operate in a different way.”
“It’s about delivering value to our end users quickly. It’s about finding ways of working that aim to bring regular deployments. Constant enhancement. Constant value adds,” he added.
Parnity, a Brazilian freight forwarding start-up, is creating a one-stop platform for forwarders to connect with fellow forwarders and manage their networks.
Find out more about the platform here.