After revealing a brand new website in May this year, Qatar Airways is taking the next step towards its digital transformation journey with the release of a revamped, comprehensive, and intuitive cargo customer portal called ‘Digital Lounge’.
The comprehensive platform offers forwarder customers full access to a broad range of activities with a single access, including booking, shipment tracking, account management, reporting, and other services—online. No more need for phone or email communication as in the past.
Built on the Salesforce platform, Digital Lounge will provide better engagement and interaction, increased productivity and time management, as well as better visibility, transparency and performance monitoring.
Qatar said the platform offers instant confirmation for general cargo bookings subject to availability and required validations. Customers can book free sale and allotments with dimensions (excluding BUP). It plans to include the whole portfolio in the foreseeable future.
“Digitalisation is the cornerstone of The Next Generation, which places user experience and ease at the centre of our activities,” underlined Guillaume Halleux, Chief Officer Cargo at Qatar Airways
“Through the Digital Lounge, Qatar Airways Cargo has opted for an omni-channel digital strategy whereby the customers are given a wide variety of choices in how they wish to interact with us.”
Qatar said the use of API or Application Programming Interface has rapidly accelerated user growth over the last 2 years for air cargo capacity marketplaces, with the airline now offering capacity on three leading platforms.
Following the airline’s partnership with WebCargo last year, it has already started offering its capacity on CargoAi and cargo.one on selected markets.
The WebCargo Pay option is available for forwarder customers in seven countries: Spain, Ireland, Japan, Singapore, United Kingdom, the United States and South Africa. With the payment platform, it offers non-IATA or CASS freight forwarders as well as customers who are not registered with Qatar Airways, the ability to e-book cargo on flights in its network.
With all this done online and paperless, users can guarantee significantly less environmental impact to some degree, which kind of ticks all the boxes, if you ask me.
