Where's my shipment, answered from the TMS: Celeste for logistics

The freight industry built entire visibility platforms so customers could see where their shipments are, and customers still email. “Any update on PRO 4471?” lands in the ops inbox, someone opens the TMS, reads the last check call, and types what it says. The customer had a portal login the whole time. Portals do not get used; questions do.

Celeste answers the question the way your ops team does, from the TMS, without your ops team.

The check call, automated on the answering side

Connect your TMS as a tool and “where is my shipment” gets a real reply: picked up Tuesday, currently in transit, appointment set for Thursday morning, last known location if you track it. The agent reads what your system says and writes it the way a person would, at 6am when the shipper’s own customer is asking them, not at 9:30 when your inbox gets worked.

Scope is enforced where it counts. The customer who asks verifies who they are, and every lookup runs constrained to that customer’s own freight by code outside the AI. Shipper A never sees shipper B’s lanes, volumes, or delays, and an unverified sender gets no shipment data at all, no matter whose PRO number they happen to have. In a business where your customers compete with each other, that constraint is not a nice-to-have. It is the reason you can automate the answer at all.

Pickups and paperwork

Pickup requests become structured intake: origin, destination, pallet count, weight, class if they know it, dock hours, reference numbers. Connect scheduling as a tool and the request becomes a booked pickup or a drafted one. Like every write in the product, you classify the action before the agent may execute it. Most operations start with pickups arriving as held drafts a dispatcher approves in one click, then classify routine lanes as automatic once the drafts have proven clean.

Document requests, PODs, BOLs, invoices copies, are fetch-and-send against the requester’s own shipments, which quietly removes one of the most tedious lines in the ops day.

Claims are triage, not adjudication

A damage or shortage claim starts as intake: which shipment, what condition, photos, delivery receipt notes, value. The agent collects the file and hands your claims person a complete packet instead of a fragmentary thread. It does not decide outcomes, ever. Words like “claim,” “damaged,” “refused,” “missing” can go on the escalation keyword list, which bars an autonomous reply and holds the message for a human, flagged with the word that tripped it. High-tension freight situations deserve a person, and the list makes that a rule rather than a hope.

Proven on your own lanes first

The agent starts in shadow mode against your real customer email, drafting silently while ops reads what it would have said. Status questions graduate first, since they are read-only and scoped. Pickup scheduling goes live as held drafts. Claims stay triage-only permanently. Each topic has its own dial, moved when you move it.

The math for a 3PL or carrier is check-call arithmetic: count the daily “any update” emails, multiply by the minutes each one takes an ops rep who could be solving an actual service failure. That number is what the desk gives back, and your customers get their answer at the hour their own customer asked them.

See how it works or the product. The trial runs silent against your live inbox, so you can grade a week of drafts against your own TMS before anything sends.