With a “360-degree view of the customer,” Lufthansa Cargo seamlessly manages record-breaking growth

Developing a customer-centric approach to logistics 

More than 90 years ago, Lufthansa opened its first cargo routes between Berlin, London, Amsterdam, Paris, and other major European cities. Today, Lufthansa Cargo is one of the world’s leading companies in airfreight transportation, delivering shipments to more than 100 countries around the world. 

Whether transporting high-security museum art, essential healthcare supplies, or Valentine’s Day flower shipments, Lufthansa Cargo provides transport service with speed, efficiency, and care. With new digitalization initiatives, state-of-the-art airplane fleets, and a goal to become the world’s most sustainable airline, Lufthansa Cargo is at the forefront of innovation within the aviation industry. 

Cargo airlines use freight ton kilometers (FTK) as a measure of how much freight business is carried out. One FTK is equal to one metric ton of revenue carried over one kilometer (that’s 2,204 pounds carried over about .62 miles). In 2021, Lufthansa Cargo sold 7.2 billion freight ton kilometers, which is a significant increase compared to 6.5 billion freight ton kilometers in 2020. 

The scale of Lufthansa’s business, coupled with its continued growth, ambitious goals, and focus on customer service and innovation for 2022, meant that the organization needed an advanced system to manage customer service and sales. 

Centralizing cross-team collaboration

An aging system had left Lufthansa Cargo with siloed information, data duplicates, and limited functionality. The organization embarked on a CRM migration project with a clear goal in mind: to replace their outdated system with something more streamlined, efficient, and accessible. The solution was oneCRM, a custom-developed platform built on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, and Dynamics 365 Customer Voice. 

With oneCRM, customer information and communications are channeled into a centralized location, eliminating the hassle of checking multiple databases. Sales and customer service teams can get detailed, real-time insight into cases and customer data all in one place, even if the customer has interacted with multiple departments across the organization. This allows for more powerful cross-team collaboration and reduced the previous siloed approach of a separate sales and service system. 

“The biggest impact of Dynamics 365 is that the customer information is more centralized, which saves time and gives us a 360-degree view of the customer,” says Petra Velten, Business Expert Customer Service at Lufthansa Cargo. “Users from our customer service department told me it is easy and efficient to work with the new CRM system.”

With the new solution, Lufthansa Cargo can more efficiently prioritize incoming cases and provide responses quickly, helping the organization meet their customer promise of on-time delivery. "It is a powerful tool that provides valuable insights that can eventually drive customer satisfaction and help generate new sales,” says Velten.

Designing for productivity and maximum impact

oneCRM is designed to organize information in a chronological, intuitive way. Microsoft Exchange is directly integrated into the system, ending the need to search for related emails or piece together customer information across multiple apps. Dynamics 365 Customer Service has enabled the case management teams to address support requests but also fix incidents faster and with greater accuracy. 

Because Lufthansa Cargo sales and service teams are familiar with other Microsoft products, the oneCRM user interface (UI) is easy for them to learn and use right away. “Staying with Microsoft products makes our lives easier, both in technical and operational efforts,” says Evelyn Frickel, Application Manager and Product Owner of oneCRM at Lufthansa Cargo. And because of the advanced functionalities built into Microsoft products, Lufthansa Cargo can build new features, while still maintaining a cohesive and user-friendly system. “There’s just way more options now than we ever had before,” Frickel explains. “Microsoft Dynamics 365 also decreased our operating cost by 30% across the entire CRM solution, while fully supporting our Cloud First Strategy.” 

Creating end-to-end customer journeys 

The customers of Lufthansa Cargo—who are primarily business-to-business (B2B) clients—often have complex shipping requirements and requests. “The businesses expect us to know who they are and what they need,” says Andrea Wernecke-Schumacher, Senior Manager of Sales Processes and Tools at Lufthansa Cargo. More connected data helps make this possible, giving Lufthansa Cargo the insights needed to enable more sales, provide customers with more fitting offers, and consistently deliver superior levels of service. 

“The major advantage is the level of transparency between the different departments,” says Michele D’Angelo, Senior Manager of Processes and Performance for Global Customer Service at Lufthansa Cargo. “It ensures we're always talking about the same customer—no matter at which of the multiple touchpoints they engage with us throughout their journey.” 

In addition, D’Angelo says that with Dynamics 365 Customer Service the organization is able, for the first time, “to globally measure internal performance across all our service teams working with oneCRM.”

The system also generates proactive content suggestions for customer service solutions, which allows teams to harness all available data to make more informed decisions. In addition, Lufthansa Cargo has new sources of information, including more integrations of customer surveys via Dynamics 365 Customer Voice. As a result, the organization has a deeper understanding of customer needs and can adapt more quickly to meet those needs. For example, Dynamics 365 provides end users with a guided process to quickly create customer interaction through surveys to gather their feedback and improve customer satisfaction. Sales and Customer Service users work based on the same account and contact data to not lose any information in the handover process.

“We get much more processable data out of the system,” says D’Angelo. “And this has set the base to foster a Learning Organization that gives us the ability to see where we can continue to improve our services and business processes. This all contributes to an enhanced customer experience.”

An infrastructure that transcends boundaries to innovation

For the Lufthansa Cargo team, the successful adoption of oneCRM is just the start. “When we started this project, the focus was on the migration of existing systems,” says Wernecke-Schumacher. “But throughout the implementation, we started developing more ideas and reimagining what’s possible for us.” Wernecke-Schumacher states that the new system has sparked a shift in mindset and enabled the organization to break through barriers—both in technology and in methodology. 

Microsoft is supporting Lufthansa Cargo after the initial rollout. Working with Marc Kloepfer, Microsoft Customer Success Manager, Lufthansa Cargo participated in a Value Realization Workshop about driving continuous innovation and how to identify untapped value potential in their oneCRM solution. The workshop resulted in Lufthansa Cargo creating a defined value path on what to prioritize for oneCRM over the upcoming months. 

Says D’Angelo, “The workshop gave us a comprehensive overview on what the platform has to offer beyond how we are already using it in oneCRM. With this overview, we can tackle innovation from a technical perspective and get inspiration for business process design sessions. It is a great help for us.” 

With oneCRM in place as a scalable infrastructure for information access, Lufthansa Cargo teams are now thinking more creatively across borders, processes, structures, and even organizational targets. “There are many opportunities where we’re still implementing new functionalities,” says Frickel. “It’s the beginning of the road for us to explore what’s next.”

Find out more about Lufthansa Cargo on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn.