Delivery exceptions sorted before the morning call

Northpoint moves freight for about 300 shippers across the Benelux and Germany. Every night, carriers send status updates by email, portal and API: late loads, missed slots, damaged pallets. By 07:00 there were often 150 of them waiting.

Three people spent the first hours of every day sorting them, opening tickets and writing the same customer emails. The morning dispatch call started late, and the urgent cases were buried under the routine ones.

We started with one week of looking at the queue, not at the tools. Out of 31 exception types, 9 made up 80% of the volume, and all 9 had a clear rule.

• Week 1: map the exception types and the rule behind each one
• Week 2: train the triage agent on 14 months of past tickets, with the dispatch lead marking every mistake
• Week 3: switch it on for the 9 types, with every customer email held for approval

Anything outside those 9 types still goes to a person, with the carrier message and the shipment history attached.

• Exception sorting down from 9 hours a day to 35 minutes of approvals
• The dispatch call starts at 08:00 with a short list of real problems
• 94% of drafted customer emails go out without an edit
• No new hires through two peak seasons

The three people who did the sorting now work the cases that need judgement: rebookings, claims and the shippers who call.