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Thomas MellaDirector of Customer Success, FourKites

When you implement a visibility solution packed with enough digital horsepower to shift your supply chain out of the status quo, it’s critical to take action to help your teams deepen their engagement with that solution. It’s the only way a platform like FourKites can have a measurable impact on the success of your business.

FourKites customers like Ryder and Land O’Lakes have hundreds of active users leveraging the platform every single day. But, like all new adopters, when they started off on their visibility journey, they began with just a few users. 

To get to where they are today, these customers put their teams in the driver’s seat and gave them the tools they need to generate value across their end-to-end supply chain. Today, they ensure their teams are engaged daily, and they are continuously learning about how to more strategically leverage FourKites. 

For example, in analyzing track-and-trace efficiency across our customer base, we discovered that platform users save 20 minutes, on average, when they use a load-level encrypted URL through the FourKites app. FourKites customers who use this feature 500 times per month save 166 hours. At $30 an hour, that’s $5,000 per month! 

The only way to achieve consistent results like this is by increasing user engagement. So what’s the secret to building a base of users who don’t just feel required to use a visibility platform but rather want to after seeing the impact on their job and organization?

Best Practices for Growing User Engagement

One of our standout customers, a leading CPG company, has built tremendous user engagement with FourKites across its supply chain. Just recently, after getting the vast majority of its loads to track consistently, the company opened up FourKites to a broader internal audience, including its Customer Service, Distribution and Planning teams.

Given the success this customer continues to achieve, it’s worth taking a look at the user engagement best practices they’re following to maximize efficiency, improve customer satisfaction and generate value across their supply chain.

1. Use daily standups to celebrate wins and collaboratively troubleshoot
Daily standups are effective for increasing user engagement because they support transparency and accountability, while encouraging teamwork and a culture of winning. These meetings can be used to discuss roadblocks, share tips and tricks, and celebrate achievements.

As the company’s Senior Manager of Transportation Operations explained, “We added a FourKites update to our daily operations standup for our super users who manage exceptions in the platform. This update allows them to discuss any outstanding exceptions, and also to highlight creative and effective ways they addressed unexpected problems to ensure loads stayed on track for timely delivery.”

2. Find creative ways to reinforce new workflows
Incorporating a new platform into habitual workstreams takes time as individuals and teams adjust. To support this process, successful companies design new workflows that are empowering and enjoyable for users, and they restructure teams and evolve roles based on these new processes.

In the case of this CPG customer, the supply chain organization moved from a traditional track-and-trace approach to “exception management” after implementing FourKites in order to identify and act on exceptions in their supply chain using the platform’s executive dashboard. The organization helped ease the discomfort of these changes by gamifying the experience through the use of the dashboard to track progress.

“We restructured part of our track-and-trace team to be dedicated FourKites super users,” the senior manager said. “Early on in our implementation, we used a reward program approach to increase engagement in FourKites in our daily work.”

3. Use ongoing training to keep employees engaged
While the initial implementation process for a visibility platform like FourKites may only take a few weeks, ongoing training is crucial to long-term organizational success. This can be in the form of webinars, user conferences, trainings and beta programs, as well as other creative approaches.

“We’ve done a few things to help keep users engaged through learning. We created a ‘Where’s my truck?’ quiz; we co-lead super user training with FourKites; and we collaborate on developing use cases for each workstream. Ultimately, super users are tasked with driving adoption and usage within those workstreams,” the senior manager said.

Continuing education is mutually beneficial to both companies and their employees. When users are engaged with their work and passionate about the tools at their disposal, they’re more apt to generate new value for the company. It also helps keep the IT budget in check, since employees will extract maximum value from one platform, rather than trying to add additional tools to their tech stack.

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What best practices are you following to ensure your FourKites users are engaged with the platform and utilizing it to drive new value across your supply chain? Download our User Engagement Value Packet for more ideas on how to build more engaged teams.

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