Because of the novel coronavirus, the global economy, particularly international trade, has been severely affected. Global container shipping has to be rerouted, avoiding ports in cities where there are high infection and mortality rates. Couriers are cutting down their usual delivery activities. And, these changes in the global market are forcing logistics service providers to make sacrifices.

In light of the pandemic, can logistics service providers like you survive? Yes, you can.

While shelter-in-place or stay-at-home orders are restricting people’s movements, they also present opportunities to logistics service providers like you to innovate and adapt new ways of doing business. If you were simply a courier performing package deliveries before the outbreak, then you could start delivering food and doing grocery runs instead.

But, how about providers of international shipping and delivery services? Because of supply chain disruptions, there have been backlogs of delayed deliveries, leaving companies in a bind.

To keep things running smoothly, many companies have turned to outsourcing support services, which has been proven to alleviate the rising costs of providing logistics services amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Setting up a remote support team in another location brings benefits that could make your logistics business up and running while the world is waiting for the pandemic to end.

1. Shorter time-to-deliver estimates in the supply chain.

Because of the comfort and ease that online shopping brings to those trapped in their apartments and homes, expect a surge in orders and deliveries throughout the quarantine. However, an increase in demand for items to be delivered on time means you could be dealing with a bottleneck of scheduled deliveries if your support teams remained the same size and your system continued to perform at the same level as before.

Your business cannot afford to extend delivery dates when the packages you may be transporting contain medical supplies, which are badly needed everywhere. So, what do you do? Outsource the back-office support for shipping, trucking, and courier services. When more people are handling the backlog for logistics support services, you’ll have truckers carry shipments through the fastest routes.

With outsourcing, shipping companies and couriers can meet the demands of their consumers (standard 2 to 3 business days of waiting) even when they had to ship and deliver more packages than usual.

2. Extra hands helping you provide after-sales support to your consumers.

As orders start piling up, your workflow becomes frantic, the workload gets heavier by the day, and your system may have to be upgraded, which is something you may not be prepared for financially. Even when you have the resources to upgrade, can you source the technology right now considering that the manufacturing industry is reporting contracted figures showing almost zero activity?

Moreover, is your team equipped to handle such an overwhelming demand from your consumers? Together with an outsourced logistics support team, you can relieve the pressure to reach daily targets from your employees.

Shipping, trucking, and courier service providers are the ones who bear the brunt of a customer’s anger. Sellers may resent their unreliable shippers. Truckers may feel the hate from distributors whenever they arrive late. And, people are quite vicious with dilly-dallying couriers when they don’t receive their goods on time.

Fortunately, an outsourced customer support team provides relief from those stressful situations. You’ll have extra hands to help you manage your workflow. Remote workers serve as an extension of your team and can also alternate with other employees when they have to follow a regimented work schedule because of social distancing rules.

You’d be considered lucky if you were able to set up a work-from-home arrangement with all of your employees. But, when circumstances prevent you from achieving that, you’ll need the extra arm to do the work for you and your customers. You can choose how many agents you want to add to your team based on your budget and support needs.

3. Managing other aspects of the global supply chain.

You may have heard about customer support as a service mostly outsourced by logistics companies for handling customer queries in regards to their orders and deliveries. Aside from the sought-after service, you can also hire back-office assistants to handle other aspects of the global supply chain.

Because as the global supply chain enables your business to save costs while operating globally and being near to your customers, the price for having your business in almost all continents includes added supervision, stacks of work documents, and delivery services issues.

For instance, some ports require a lot of necessary signatures for each cargo container that can tie your inventory up for days or weeks. Outsourcing back-office assistants can help you manage it, as well as warehousing management, inventory management, and trucking and delivery services.

This pandemic left us all in shock and its effects will surely leave a mark in our world. But we need to think about how to keep our business on track and help keep the economy from collapsing.

The supply chain might be difficult to manage now because of the unseen enemy, but there is always a way to overcome it or even just mitigating its impact on your business. And that’s outsourcing. There is always an outsourcing service that you can take advantage of in your logistics business. With outsourcing, you can save on operational costs, you can provide quality service to your customers, and you can lessen your workload so you can focus on your core business activities.

Featured Image by Markus Spiske on Unsplash