BOOKING ON THE MOVE, WHEN THE COMPETITION ALREADY DOES

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Work > Derry Bros

Derry Bros Shipping are leading booking agents in the freight and shipping industry. Their customers are operators and businesses moving goods across borders, on schedules that don't bend to fit a phone call to the office.

They came to us in 2017 to tender for a mobile app. After spending time with their team, it became clear that an app on its own wouldn't fix what was actually slowing the business down.

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THE PROBLEM

Customers were going elsewhere because competitors made booking easier.

The booking process worked, but it wasn't built for how customers were now choosing to operate:

No Self Service

Customers had no self-service route. If they wanted to book outside office hours, or while moving between sites, they were reliant on someone answering an out-of-hours call.
Manual Entry

Bookings ran through tele-sales and manual entry. Every job took staff time to take, type, confirm and chase, regardless of how simple the booking was.
Disconnected Workflow

Shipping operator confirmations were a separate manual step. Information was being re-keyed between systems, which slowed turnaround and introduced room for error.
Booking Capacity

Internal capacity was capped by the number of people taking bookings, not by the demand for bookings themselves.

Derry Bros didn't need a digital version of the existing booking form. They needed to remove the bottleneck between a customer wanting to book and a booking being confirmed with the operator.

WHAT WE BUILT

A connected platform across three surfaces, designed around how Derry Bros and their customers actually work:

01. A mobile app for customers (iOS and Android).

Customers search routes, select shipment type, enter job details, upload documentation and receive confirmation, all without phoning in. The flow is built for the regular booker who knows what they need, but accessible enough for the occasional one.
02. An updated marketing site and customer-facing portal.

The web experience was rebuilt to match the self-service model the app introduced, so customers landing on the site could complete a booking themselves rather than being routed back to tele-sales.
03. An expanded internal management platform.

Derry Bros staff can now create, assign, and monitor jobs, manage customer accounts, and handle escalations from a single platform that scales with the volume coming through the app.
04. Shipping operator integration.

Booking data flows directly from the app or portal into operator systems, removing the manual confirmation step that used to sit between booking and dispatch.

The platform was built to take more volume without needing to be rebuilt every time the business grows.

WHAT CHANGED

01.

20% increase in annual revenue following rollout

02.

The app outperformed tele-sales bookings by 120% on key accounts

03.

20% reduction in administrative staffing burden, with staff redeployed from data entry into proactive sales and customer service

04.

Booking capacity expanded without adding headcount

The bookings that used to need a phone call now happen on the customer's schedule. The staff who used to take them are now doing higher-value work.

WHY IT WORKED

Derry Bros came to us asking for a mobile app. Spending the time to understand how their business actually ran is what turned the project into something bigger.

The booking app on its own would have improved one part of the customer experience. What they actually needed was a platform that connected the customer, the office and the shipping operator into a single flow, so that growth wasn't capped by how many bookings the team could manually process.

We've continued to work with Derry Bros since launch, expanding the platform as their volume, services and operational needs have grown. The result is a business that can take more bookings, in more ways, without the operation buckling under the weight of its own success.