Logistics
A customer portal for logistics companies
Every "where is my shipment?" call interrupts your team and tells your customer you have no better way to answer. A customer portal gives them the answer before they pick up the phone.
Sythera Labs builds customer portals for carriers, freight forwarders and 3PLs: shipment status, documents and quote requests behind one login, in English and Spanish.
The cost of running customer service by email
In most small and mid-sized logistics companies, the customer’s view of a shipment lives in someone’s inbox. Status updates go out by email. A bill of lading or proof of delivery is a PDF that someone has to find and forward. Quote requests arrive through three different channels.
It works at low volume. As you grow, the same questions come in faster than your team can answer them, and the people who should be moving freight spend their day forwarding attachments.
Large carriers solved this years ago with customer portals. The difference now is that a portal no longer requires an enterprise budget or a year-long project.
What your customers see
- Shipment status: each active shipment with its current stage and key dates, without calling operations.
- Documents: bills of lading, proofs of delivery, invoices and customs paperwork attached to the shipment they belong to, ready to download.
- Document upload: customers send you what you need from them in the same place, instead of by email.
- History: past shipments and their paperwork, searchable when their accounting team asks months later.
- Quote requests: a form that asks for what you need to price the load and puts the request straight into your queue.
- Company accounts: several users from the same customer sharing one view of their freight.
What your team gets
Fewer interruptions is the obvious one. The less obvious benefit is a single record: every shipment with its documents and its conversation in one place, instead of spread across inboxes that leave with the employee.
Quote requests stop getting lost, because each one is recorded and assigned. And because customers upload their own paperwork against a specific shipment, nobody has to match attachments to loads by hand.
Built around the systems you already use
A portal is only useful if the information in it is current. In the first call we look at where your shipment data lives today, whether that is a TMS, a spreadsheet or an accounting system, and decide how the portal will be fed.
Sometimes that is an integration. Sometimes the right first version is a simple internal screen where your team updates status once and every customer sees it. We would rather ship something small that is always accurate than something ambitious that is out of date by Thursday.
Bilingual, for cross-border freight
If your freight crosses the US–Mexico border, so do your customers. We build the portal in English and Spanish, and each user picks their language. Our team is bilingual, based in Guadalajara and working in US time zones, so your operations people on either side can talk to us directly.
How we deliver it
- Discover: a call to map your current process, then a requirements brief with scope and timeline.
- Design: a clickable prototype of the portal that you and a couple of your customers can try before we write code.
- Build: short cycles, weekly check-ins and a staging environment with realistic data.
- Launch and run: we go live together and the portal moves onto a monthly care plan with hosting, security updates and hours for changes.
Our logistics work so far
We are the ongoing technical partner for Select Group, a US group with companies in storage, trailers, transportation and construction, and we built all four of their websites. For Urbania, the group’s construction company, we built a custom CMS that lets their team publish projects, photos and status updates without developer help. A customer portal applies the same idea to freight: your team updates once, your customers see it.
Frequently asked questions
Does the portal integrate with our TMS?
It depends on the TMS and what access it offers. We check in the discovery call. If a direct integration is not possible, the portal can be updated from a simple internal screen or a scheduled import.
Is this real-time GPS tracking?
Not by default. The portal shows the status and milestones of each shipment. If you already have GPS or ELD data and want it shown to customers, we look at that as part of the scope.
Do customers need to install an app?
No. The portal runs in a web browser on a computer or phone. Customers sign in with their own account and only see their own shipments.
How is customer data kept separate?
Each customer account only has access to its own shipments and documents. Access rules are part of the design from the first prototype, not something added at the end.
Can we start small?
Yes. A common first version is a quote form plus shipment status. Documents and history can follow once your team and customers are using it.
Who maintains it after launch?
We do. Every build moves onto a monthly care plan, handled by the same team that built it, with a defined response time.
Walk us through a shipment
Book 30 minutes and show us how a load moves through your company today. We will tell you what a first version of your portal could look like.
Prefer email? We reply within one business day: info@sytheralabs.com