DGS Transports is an independent, family-owned transport and logistics company. Its core business is groupage freight across France and Europe, alongside regional distribution, LTL/FTL freight brokerage and warehousing.
With AI agents built by Guided, DGS Transports has automated part of its phone calls for booking delivery appointments. Since the start of the project, more than 17,000 calls have been placed and 50% of appointments have been booked without human intervention.
The challenge
Groupage freight moves pallets and goods on short lead times through several platforms linked in a network. Before delivering to a platform, it is often necessary to book an appointment in advance. It gives the consignee visibility, helps them plan their docks and prevents goods from taking up space at the shipper for longer than necessary.
At DGS Transports, hundreds of shipments need an appointment every day, and most are booked by phone. For each shipment, dispatchers call one or more numbers several times, leaving a voicemail when nobody answers in the hope of being called back later that day.
This essential but time-consuming work took up the equivalent of 2.5 full-time employees (FTE) and was regularly identified as low-value work.
The method
After discussions between Guided and DGS Transports, followed by an on-site audit, appointment booking was quickly identified as a priority use case for automation. Our team spent several days at the Limeil-Brévannes warehouse with dispatchers to understand the process, listen to calls and write the standard operating procedure (SOP).
Once the SOP had been approved by the dispatchers and the DGS Transports operations department, Guided configured its voice agent using anonymised conversations taken from call recordings.
The first version covered only one call per shipment and sent an automated Microsoft Teams message once the appointment was booked. Today, for each shipment, the agent can:
- contact the consignee up to five times
- interact with automated phone menus
- stay on hold until it reaches the right person
- leave a voicemail on the first attempt if nobody answers
Once the appointment is booked, the slot is automatically pushed into DGS Transports' transport management system (TMS). A daily summary is also sent to the teams at the end of the day.
In production, the system analyses completed calls, detects anomalies and regressions, and learns from its mistakes. This approach keeps call quality high over time.
The results
What started as a few dozen calls a week during the test phase quickly grew to more than 400 appointments a week. Since the start of the project:
- more than 8,000 shipments have been handled by the agents
- 17,000 phone calls have been placed
- around 50% of appointments have been booked without human intervention
With this automation, appointment booking now needs only one full-time employee, assisted by the voice agent for complex cases and call-backs. Dispatchers can spend their time on higher-value work, while DGS Transports can absorb growth without increasing headcount.
The future of the partnership
This project, running at the Limeil-Brévannes site, will be extended to DGS Transports' other agencies. Other use cases are also being rolled out to help operations teams save time and offer a better service to DGS Transports' customers.
What DGS Transports says
"Working with Guided has been a real partnership. Appointment booking has taken low-value calls off our teams, and we now want to extend it to the other agencies."
Ludovic Charlec, Director of Operations, DGS Transports
