Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to improve service quality of international freight forwarders and explore practical business solutions to enhance customer service level. Freight forwarder usually acts as an agent to source logistics service for shipper and work closely with carriers such as shipping line and airline companies. This business is characterized by lower capital investment and entry barrier comparing with carriers, and most of their major customers are small or medium size manufactures or traders. Providing high quality service to enhance customer satisfaction is the key mission since competition is extremely severe. This paper empirically investigates the leading freight forwarders to find important customer requirements in East Asian region such as Japan, Korea and Taiwan. Furthermore, the feature of the study by using quality function deployment approach would not only identify key technical measures but also explore meaningful business solutions as direction of quality improvement. The finding reveals key customer requirements are cheaper agency fees, door to door ability and instant response, and the key technical measures are customer relationship management, overall information system, service point and network. We would further discuss the empirical result and conclude managerial meaning for decision makers.
Highlights
Global trade is the vigorous force triggering the growth of both regional and world economy
Governments make effort to minimize logistics cost through improve infrastructure to overcome the trade barriers and vitalize their manufactures and products to stay competitive in the global market
According to the recent publication of WTO and UNCTAD, over 75% of the global trade is completed by containerised cargo shipping and the rest of the cargo is mainly dependent on land or air transportation. (WTO, 2013; UNCTAD, 2013) International freight forwarder plays the
Summary
Global trade is the vigorous force triggering the growth of both regional and world economy. International trade brings a lot of advantages to nations and enterprises to share the fruit of business activities as well as provides people various options to buy their daily necessities. These activities rely on international transportation to connect cargo, people and country to facilitate business growth and regional prosperity. According to the recent publication of WTO and UNCTAD, over 75% of the global trade is completed by containerised cargo shipping and the rest of the cargo is mainly dependent on land or air transportation. According to the recent publication of WTO and UNCTAD, over 75% of the global trade is completed by containerised cargo shipping and the rest of the cargo is mainly dependent on land or air transportation. (WTO, 2013; UNCTAD, 2013) International freight forwarder plays the
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