The Update Sends Itself: How KCH Gave Its Account Managers a Third of Their Week Back

OpenTrack AI Workflows that KCH deployed: real-time milestone triggers, white-label customer email, proactive Last Free Day alerts, and exception-only routing.

KCH Transportation is one of the country's leading drayage providers, moving import containers from port to final destination for some of the biggest names in logistics. For every container it handles, the customer wants the answers to the same five questions:

• Is it off the vessel yet?
• Does it have a delivery appointment?
• Has it been delivered?
• Is the empty container back?
• Is the demurrage clock running?

KCH's account managers used to answer all five by hand. Now the answer sends itself, and the team spends its day on the exceptions instead of the entire inbox.

Results at a glance

• $225K in account manager capacity recovered every year
• ~30% of account manager time returned to higher-value work
• ~100K customer milestone emails a year, sent automatically instead of by hand

Account managers were the bottleneck on every customer update

Before OpenTrack AI Workflows were deployed, keeping a customer informed meant an account manager sitting in the TMS, watching for a status to change, and typing the same updates over and over: Last Free Day, Outgate, Delivery Appointment, Delivered, Ingate. Every container required at least five manual touches for complete customer visibility, and the work only grew as volume did.

That left KCH's customer-facing team fighting the same problems every day:

• Roughly a third of every account manager's time went to checking status and relaying it: over 6,000 hours a year the team could have spent on the relationship, not the readout.
• Timely updates depended on someone being free to send them. On a busy day, a shifting Last Free Day or a status change would sit until someone had a free moment to send it, rather than reaching the customer the instant it changed.
• Answering a basic "where's my box?" required a drayage expert. The knowledge lived in people's heads, so coverage was spread thin and inconsistent.
• The burden scaled with the business. Every new container added five more updates to write, so growth made the problem worse, not better.

Now the update sends itself, white-labeled and on time

KCH enlisted OpenTrack to build an autonomous AI workflow to handle the relay work. Now the platform watches every container and drafts a personalized update the moment a real milestone fires, then sends it white-labeled from a KCH inbox, with one clean thread per container. The customer sees KCH and gets the whole journey in a single conversation, and the account manager is out of the relay loop entirely.

What that changes for KCH's customers and team:

• Updates trigger on real events, not manual checks. The moment a container is outgated, delivered, or ingated, the email is already going out.
• Customers get ahead of demurrage. Proactive Last Free Day alerts fire the moment the clock is set and again if it moves, so a customer can act before a charge lands instead of after.
• Every customer gets exactly the updates they expect: the right milestones, the right reference numbers, to the right contacts, following each customer's own playbook.
• A human only touches the exceptions. The routine flows automatically; anything unusual routes straight to KCH ops, so nothing important slips through quietly.

From reactive relay to managing only the exceptions

The pilot proved itself, and KCH moved it into full production. The payoff shows up in three places at once: about $225,000 a year in recovered account manager capacity, close to 30% of account manager time handed back to higher-value work, and an estimated 100,000 milestone emails a year that now write and send themselves.

It's live and stable across KCH's first customers, and KCH has committed to rolling it out across the rest of its book. Just as important is where the freed-up time goes: the same hours that once went to status relay are now the capacity KCH is counting on to win and serve more drayage business, without needing every account manager to be a drayage expert.

The bottom line for KCH

• Account managers freed from manual status relay and back on revenue work
• Customers updated in real time, white-labeled, with zero added headcount
• Fewer demurrage surprises thanks to proactive Last Free Day alerts
• A workflow that pays for itself in the first months and gets more valuable as volume grows

See what your team could stop doing by hand. Schedule a demo with OpenTrack.