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“The great thing about MachShip is the training. And the responsiveness of their support desk is out of this world. It’s next level.”
Scott
Managing Director

Customer Spotlight

Benchmark Logistics

From Startup to Success: How Benchmark Logistics Scaled Up in Record Time with MachShip

Benchmark Logistics is an Australian freight management company, helping multinational retailers get their goods from A to B cost-effectively. The business is actually an offshoot of founder Scott Noakes’ original venture, Benchmark Cost Solutions.

The main challenge he faced was having to hit the ground running for clients needing bulk solutions at short notice. With the business barely 18-months-old, and only operating with a team of two, Scott has been able to service high-volume clients, already handling over 50,000 consignments per annum.

MachShip has enabled Benchmark to reconcile these orders immediately and reliably, without having to worry about bottlenecks or human error.

“It’s just me, a piece of software, and one other employee, managing freight on behalf of people. And MachShip technology has allowed me to grow to my three-year goal in less than 12 months,” Scott said.

A complex challenge made simple

His partnership with MachShip is not for lack of options, either. After plenty of trial and error with competitor products, he kept encountering dealbreakers – ranging from overly complex interfaces, convoluted training and onboarding, or being locked into a hefty minimum spend. As a new business, scalability was key for Benchmark. 

“I searched for six months and trialled other options. In the end, it was a no-brainer and no competition to partner with MachShip,” he said.

“They were very generous and said ‘we’ll give you a tailored subscription fee for six months’, so it was a good honeymoon period. It gave the business a chance to grow and evolve.” 

When it came to actually understanding the product and how to use it, Scott found MachShip far easier to engage with than other software he’d used before. 

“I always liked [MachShip’s offering]. But when I actually started with them, the training was great. That was a massive point of difference. And the responsiveness of their support desk is out of this world. It’s next level.”

This simplicity and support has been a game-changer for Benchmark, freeing up Scott to focus on what he loves doing most – building client relationships.

A user experience that’s actually user-friendly

By his own admission, Scott doesn’t want to deal with the admin side of things. He needed a no-nonsense solution that made sense at a glance. Again, MachShip delivered.

“How it visually looks – that was the first tick. The intuitive user interface and the visual display is nothing like I’ve seen in the market. The tracking page is unreal.”

“I can actually see how to get from one step to another. I’m the worst person to do it, but I found MachShip is by far the most intuitive and logical user experience. The menus were really good as well.”

“It feels like I’ve got a true business, in the sense that my employee can work in MachShip while I’m just observing from a high level, making comments and getting snapshots sent to me. If we’ve got a problem, we can easily work it out with a quick back and forth. We’ve never not worked anything out.” 

“For example, my colleague gets the invoice from a carrier and imports it in. We can see if this one’s out, or this one’s an overcharge. I can just look at it and go ‘Cool, push it through to Xero’. And some of the invoices are monsters with 100-200 lines.”

Supported by customer service that cares

Perhaps the biggest help for Scott in retaining customers has been the availability of the MachShip team to put out fires on the go.

“The support is beyond my expectation. I’ve never had to deal with integrations – but they are next level as far as solving complex problems goes.”

“And the willingness for them to jump into a meeting with my client to solve a problem. Every other company would just go ‘mate, it’s your client, it’s your problem’. But if I say to MachShip, ‘I need your help’, they’re willing to jump in and help. We can just get on a call, share a screen and talk through it. They supported me to problem-solve my client’s integration problem.”

“On top of that, MachShip’s platform server is really stable, whereas other providers’ servers would go down multiple times. I don’t wanna deal with that. I don’t wanna know about it. Thankfully, now I don’t have to.”