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About ITS Logistics
Founded in 2002 by Catalina Machado, ITS Logistics is a Miami-based freight brokerage company providing ground transportation across the U.S., with cross-border services to Mexico and Canada. With deep expertise in LTL and FTL shipping, the company focuses on innovation, integrity, and teamwork to deliver reliable service and complete customer satisfaction.
Alejandro Arboleda, Operations Director at ITS Logistics, drives efficiency across operations. From the back office in Medellín, Colombia, he and his team manage inland brokerage processes that connect the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.
Challenges before Hiver
Before adopting Hiver, ITS Logistics faced several obstacles that made keeping pace with customer demands and internal growth difficult. These challenges touched every stage of communication, from quoting to dispatch, and often slowed the team down. The key issues included:
Unstructured query management: The team previously relied on Google Groups and personal inboxes. This led to overlapping threads, with up to 19 different employees responding to the same customer. Without centralized visibility, employees wasted time searching through conversations instead of focusing on quoting or tracking shipments.
No clear ownership: Without a structured system, requests often sat unanswered or were duplicated by multiple reps. Follow-ups slipped through the cracks, and managers had no visibility into who owned what or how fast it was resolved.
Manual routing: Every incoming conversation had to be read and manually routed to the team. Quotes, tracking updates, and dispatch approvals landed in the same inbox, creating bottlenecks during peak demand.
High volume without structure: Employees struggled to keep up with 150–200 customer conversations daily. Communication across phone calls and WhatsApp further fragmented the process, with no single source of truth.
No performance insights: Google Groups offered no way to measure response times, resolution rates, or satisfaction. Leadership lacked the data needed to identify gaps or improve processes.
“Hiver turned scattered queries into a structured customer service system. Every request is tracked, owned, and resolved faster.” — Alejandro Arboleda, Operations Director, ITS Logistics.
Why Hiver stood out
As daily volumes grew, Alejandro recognized the need for a solution to bring structure and accountability without disrupting existing workflows. The team needed something intuitive, cost-effective, and built directly into Gmail rather than a heavy system that would require retraining.
Hiver stood out for its simplicity and clear focus: defined ownership, visibility for managers, and processes that can scale as volumes rise. It turned scattered communication into a unified, measurable system.
“Hiver gave us exactly what we were missing — structure, accountability, and the ability to measure performance.” — Alejandro Arboleda.
Streamlining operations with Hiver
Once Hiver was adopted, the ITS Logistics team quickly began restructuring their communication workflows. They focused on consolidating customer touchpoints, adding automation, and creating clear ownership so every request had accountability. The team put these changes into practice in several concrete ways:
Centralizing customer queries
Before Hiver, customers often received messages from multiple ITS employees, creating confusion and wasted effort. To fix this, the team moved all communication into four Shared Inboxes: Quotes, Traffic/Tracking (LTL), Dispatch, and Operations FTL. They replaced 19 different email addresses with clear, function-specific contacts. This gave customers a direct path to the right team, while internally ensuring accountability and visibility for every request.
Automated workflows and routing
Today, 85–90% of requests route automatically to the right rep. VIPs reach their dedicated rep instantly, and approvals move from Quotes to Dispatch with a Tag. What once required manual hand-offs now happens seamlessly, letting the team focus on shipments and customers.
Alejandro said Automation delivered the biggest efficiency gain, freeing his team to focus on customers instead of repetitive query triage.
Analytics and Visibility
Currently, Alejandro uses Analytics to monitor workload distribution, ticket volumes per rep, and response times. This visibility helps balance workloads and spot areas for improvement.
Collaboration made transparent
Instead of burying context in private chats or WhatsApp threads, the team uses Hiver’s Notes within each conversation. Now, all discussions, whether about a quote, tracking update, or dispatch decision, appear right beside the customer request on the left panel, so the team can see and reference them later.
Smarter service with Hiver AI
ITS has been quick to put Hiver AI into practice to strengthen responsiveness and consistency. The team relies on sentiment alerts from AI Sentiment Analysis to immediately spot when a conversation carries a negative undertone. This allows them to prioritize sensitive situations and resolve them before they escalate. Alejandro noted that expanding from three to five sentiment levels will give managers even more precision in guiding responses.
“When we expand to five levels, I’ll be able to guide the team more effectively. A ‘slightly negative’ email is very different from an ‘extremely negative’ one — and that nuance helps us decide how urgently and carefully we need to respond.” — Alejandro Arboleda
AI Compose: Reps use AI Compose to adjust tone and clarity in their replies, ensuring messages are professional yet efficient. This helps newer team members align with ITS’s communication standards without slowing down responses.
“AI Compose is a great support tool — it helps the team phrase responses more clearly while still keeping our own voice with the customer.” — Alejandro Arboleda
AI Tagging: ITS is currently training AI triaging on its dataset so that conversations can be categorized automatically. This will reduce manual classification and improve reporting accuracy across quotes, tracking, and dispatch.
AI Extract: Looking ahead, ITS plans to apply AI Extract to automate pulling invoice data from PDFs, cutting down on manual work for the accounting team and speeding up billing.
Beyond email: WhatsApp and Phone Queries
While 85% of requests come by email, the team manages customer conversations via WhatsApp (10%) and phone (5%). Hiver keeps these interactions connected, ensuring consistency across channels.
Internally, the team uses Hiver’s Notes within each conversation, replacing informal back-and-forth on WhatsApp or separate emails. This keeps every discussion tied to the customer request and gives both the team and managers full visibility.
“Keeping every discussion inside Hiver has completely changed the way we work. We no longer lose context in side channels — everything stays tied to the customer, and managers have complete visibility.”
Alejandro Arboleda
ITS Logistics
Impact in the first 3 weeks
In just three weeks, the improvements were visible across the board. The team and customers began to experience the benefits of Hiver.
- Quotes response time improved by 61%: What once took over an hour now happens in just 39 minutes, enabling ITS to meet customer expectations for speed and reliability.
- Dispatch handled 26% faster: Resolution time has gone down from 35 minutes to 25 and this has helped shipments stay on schedule.
- 85–90% of assignments automated: Manual routing became a thing of the past. Teams are now free from manual query triaging so that they can focus on solving complex issues of their customers.
- Simplified customer touchpoints: Instead of navigating 19 different contacts, customers now communicate through 3–4 clear inboxes, creating a consistent experience.
- Improved morale and scalability: With clearer ownership and less noise, employees feel more confident and less overwhelmed.
“We’ve already seen strong improvements, but the real goal is scalability. We’re preparing to do more with the same headcount while keeping customer experience at the center.” — Alejandro Arboleda
What’s next for ITS Logistics
After strong early results, ITS Logistics is focused on building a long-term foundation for growth. Alejandro and his team want to gather deeper customer insights, keep service consistent, and use AI to cut manual work—while scaling without adding extra headcount.
Key initiatives include:
- Customer feedback at scale: Launching CSAT surveys and using the insights to guide service improvements.
- Service reliability: Enforcing stricter SLAs, especially for high‑complexity requests, to ensure predictable turnaround.
- Smarter automation with AI: Expanding sentiment analysis for more nuance and rolling out AI Extract to automate invoice processing.
- Knowledge sharing: Creating a centralized Knowledge Base to speed onboarding and give teams faster access to answers.
- Sales consistency: Testing scheduled email cadences to help Sales manage follow-ups more effectively.
- Unified systems: Exploring CRM and third‑party integrations to connect customer data across platforms.
“I want to eliminate the manual process and rely completely on Hiver Analytics.” — Alejandro Arboleda.
Conclusion
By adopting Hiver, ITS Logistics replaced scattered communication with a single system that gives every request clear ownership and visibility. In just three weeks, the team cut response time by 61%, sped up dispatch by 26%, and auto-routed most queries. Agents now can focus on solving more complex issues instead of query triage.
For ITS, these wins are only the beginning. The team is now scaling with AI, SLAs, and integrations to deliver faster, more consistent service as they grow.
