Alain Guerin began his position as head of marketing for Swiss WorldCargo in June. After working for Lufthansa Cargo in Atlanta, Guerin is now based in Zurich. Prior to his job at Lufthansa, he held various positions at Swiss WorldCargo. Guerin spoke with Air Cargo World about Swiss’ digital cargo offerings and challenges that the industry faces.
What plans do you have for Swiss WorldCargo as head of marketing?
We pursue our digitization efforts. We’ll very soon launch an app that will allow our customers to interact with us. And the app will basically have features that the customers want us to have, like being able to track and trace a shipment, find out who they should talk to, find out timetable information and find out information about our products and services. Also, in the next few weeks, we will come up with our e-booking solution [in mid-October], so that is definitely going towards this digitization effort that we started. And the e-booking will basically allow customers 24/7 to request bookings. A few products and services will be excluded, of course, but for the vast majority of the bookings, we’ll be able to do it online through our e-booking platform, and that platform should also help the customers in transmitting data to us as the airline for customs purposes.
On what sectors is Swiss WorldCargo concentrating?
We are about to launch a vertical industry initiative. Basically, what we would like to do is move away from the standard, typical product management and look at the business from a vertical industry perspective. In that respect, we’ve actually selected three industries, three sectors, first one being health care products and pharmaceuticals, which is a natural choice of course for Switzerland, being the hub country for some major pharma companies. Second one is the valuable, diamond, jewelry, gold and banknote business. We call it valuable and precious metal business. That’s one we’re concentrating on. And the third one is the postal/e-commerce sector that we would like to target. Postal is the mail business we carry. It’s an important part of our business today, and we believe there are some opportunities to look into the e-commerce business, which is partly moved by the mail organizations. The idea for our vertical industry management is really to first of all appoint people who can talk the same language as those customers. We will have people who can talk to the head of life science or vertical industry pharma of big customers, get the knowledge, have the same understanding, listen to what their needs are and then try to transform those needs into product services where we can really add value. We want to be seen as a reliable partner to, of course, grow and to make sure our customers can also grow in that respect with us.
What trends do you see in the air cargo industry?
The trend of overcapacity is there, that’s for sure. That is a difficult trend. What we see at the moment is like markets more or less growing, tonnage-wise, but there’s huge pressure on the yield side. So of course it is kind of difficult to maintain a sustainable business in this environment. We have big challenges also on the regulatory side. We always need to anticipate, try to find out what’s going to come next because we need to be prepared and ready to support our customers. And when it comes to markets, what we see of course is that there’s a whole segment of customers who believe that quality and service is a bit more important than just price, and this is what we want to focus on.
How do you think the airfreight industry can improve?
Speaking to those industry initiatives that we all agreed to a few years ago would be a nice thing. We really need to go the paperless way. That’s for me a key factor. We need to make it easier for everyone to do business, to send air cargo, and that is a trend that we need to focus on definitely. Quality is super important. We need to make sure that we really always focus on quality, we deliver the quality. We have this claim at Swiss that we say, “We do it right or we don’t do it at all.” And that’s exactly what we have in mind.
In what ways can air cargo companies focus on quality?
Information exchange, for instance, looks like it’s a big topic for our own customers. They want to know just about everything about the shipment at any time, so how do we respond to this? On the pharma side, you have a lot of temperature-controlled, temperature-sensitive products. Customers want to know where they are, what is the temperature inside the containers, what the package with the container opened, that kind of stuff. I think we will have to be able to answer all those questions. That’s why at Swiss, we’re looking at active tracking solutions because we see this as a need. We need to be able to provide customers with feedback on their shipment. We do already provide feedback to a certain extent, but we want really to go the extra mile and really look at those active tracking devices, for instance.