Reliability on the spot

Providing customers with an efficient and reliable experience is essential for Maersk’s growth. Maersk Spot is offering transparent prices and loading guarantee while ensuring higher operational predictability and stronger commitments from customers.

Customers do not like disruptions to their supply chains. However, it is not uncommon to see overbookings in shipping to secure high utilisation. The industry continues to face the challenge of highly volatile overbooking rates with an average of 20-30%, making it difficult to plan operations. 

For customers such as The Ramco Cements Limited, this cycle was creating a lot of frustration and uncertainty.

“We send around 120-200 containers to Colombo every week from Kattupalli port, near Chennai. Making bookings one to two weeks in advance is important to ensure that we can deliver to our customers on time, with the best deal possible,” said Ramakrishnan Damodaran, Dy General Marketing Manager of The Ramco Cements Limited.

“Even though we are proactive about our bookings, there were cases where our shipments were not loaded due to capacity issues which resulted in customers losing trust in us,” Ramakrishnan added. 

As a response to this continuous challenge and in efforts to continue the momentum in developing an industry- leading customer experience, Maersk has taken the initiative to make online bookings easier, faster, and simpler for customers.

Drawing on solid customer relationships and strong cross-functional teamwork, the Maersk Spot product is providing ocean customers with a simple online booking process that includes full price transparency, and equipment and space guarantee. 

Less uncertainty, more transparency

Efficiency, reliability and competitive pricing are the three anchors of the Maersk Spot booking experience. For short-term customers, they can count on this product to deliver transparency, assurance, strong price competitiveness, awareness and an optimised ordering flow.

“Once we started using Maersk Spot, we no longer had the uncertainty of not knowing if we could actually provide our customers with their shipments,” said Ramakrishnan. 

Moving away from 13 independent offline steps in the buying process to five simple integrated online steps, Maersk Spot is providing a radically simplified buying experience.

“Now that Maersk has introduced bookings on the spot, we are able to fulfil our supply chain needs with one company, in one place, seamlessly, with trust and commitment,.“ added Ramakrishnan, and continued:

“Not only is the flow and ordering process simplified and optimised, the attractive rates and reliability of securing equipment and space guarantee have enabled us to improve operations and provide more proactive customer service.”

Higher predictability and reliability 

As Maersk races ahead to become the global integrator of container logistics, building and delivering products and services that facilitate end-to-end solutions for customers is imperative for growth.

“Maersk Spot is giving us more operational predictability and strong customer commitment, and our customers get a digital, affordable and reliable service. All in all, this is driving an efficient and reliable customer experience, while enabling both Maersk’s growth and that of our customers,” said Johan Sigsgaard, Head of Ocean Products, Europe and Middle East trade. 

In the fourth quarter of 2019, Spot customers booked 25,000 forty-foot containers weekly, accounting for one quarter of Maersk’s total short-term volume.