Chapter 1The Challenge for FedEx

Disconnected systems limited FedEx's ability to act on valuable customer insights.

FedEx has built their business around what they call the Purple Promise: a simple but powerful commitment to make every FedEx experience outstanding. This promise drives everything from careful handling of fragile shipments to ensuring critical medical supplies reach hospitals exactly when needed and has helped them grow into the world's largest express transportation company.

Having mastered the physical side of precision delivery — getting the exact package to the exact person at the exact time — FedEx faced a new challenge. The company that could track millions of packages in real time couldn't quickly act on customer signals sitting in their own systems. Generating a petabyte of operational data daily through their business operations, the company possessed a treasure trove of customer intelligence including behavioral data, shipping patterns, and engagement signals. Yet their fragmented infrastructure made this wealth of information nearly impossible to act upon. 

For FedEx, the challenge was converting interest into action. Millions of small business customers signed shipping contracts but never followed through with their first shipment. At the same time, countless prospects were researching international shipping services online, yet lacked the personalized guidance to turn questions into confident decisions. Even when customers reached the stage of requesting complex, high-value quotes, many abandoned them at critical decision points, with no systematic way to nurture these opportunities to completion.

Sales teams could see all these revenue opportunities, but needed help from several IT teams to pull information from disconnected systems and turn it into action – a process that sometimes took weeks.

"It's imperative that we deliver the right amount of data and context to each employee at the right time," says Terrell Goldsmith, Manager in Enterprise Customer Data Platform. "Being able to target the right customers for our commercial organizations is going to help us anticipate and adapt to market trends and create high-quality, end-to-end customer journeys.”

Solving this challenge meant turning FedEx’s vast data into immediate business action. By unifying customer intelligence across sales, marketing, and service, teams could respond to signals in real time and convert dormant opportunities into growth.

Chapter 2How Salesforce Helps FedEx

Signed contracts that sit idle now trigger immediate action to get customers shipping.

To activate their wealth of operational data and unlock new capabilities with cutting-edge AI, FedEx turned to Data Cloud and Marketing Cloud, creating the foundation to connect customer information across separate systems and act on it with timely, personalized actions that drive revenue growth.

Now, when a local retailer signs a shipping agreement on Monday expecting to begin shipping Thursday, Data Cloud begins monitoring. It pieces together the contract record in Sales Cloud with real-time package scan data from FedEx's Azure data lake and Databricks environment, creating a precise activation timeline tied to the retailer's committed start date. If no packages move within a predefined timeframe,
Data Cloud's real-time intelligence instantly flags this as a dormant opportunity.

This triggers Marketing Cloud to send personalized reactivation emails highlighting the retailer's specific contract benefits and shipping discounts. When the customer clicks through the content, Data Cloud alerts the assigned sales rep in Sales Cloud with complete context about their interests, enabling a consultative follow-up call rather than a generic check-in.

“The power is in Data Cloud's ability to bring data and AI together and let us funnel it into Marketing Cloud and Sales Cloud in near-real time,” said Carlos Gonzalez, Domain Architect. “Zero copy is very attractive to us because it's easier and less expensive than ingesting the data again and landing it in multiple spots.” 

What once took weeks of manual effort across disconnected systems now happens automatically, turning signed agreements into active shippers. With Data Cloud, FedEx boosted activation rates from 25% to 40% in just five months and delivered over 2,000% ROI by reactivating dormant customers.

Customers researching international services get personalized guidance at the right moment.

FedEx is growing their international shipping business by connecting customer research behavior with shipping history. When the owner of a growing ecommerce business spends fifteen minutes browsing FedEx's international shipping pages, researching express delivery to Europe, and testing rate calculators for different package sizes,
Marketing Cloud captures every detail of this session.

Data Cloud checks this customer's shipping history from Databricks and discovers they've been domestic-only shippers for two years, despite having robust shipping volume that suggests international expansion potential. Data Cloud combines this with the customer’s browsing data from Marketing Cloud to create customer intent profiles. These help FedEx understand customer intent for international shipping, eliminating the guesswork about customer interests.

Marketing Cloud then triggers a personalized campaign based on their research behavior and profile insights. The ecommerce owner receives case studies of similar businesses expanding to European markets, detailed customs procedure guides for the countries they researched, and targeted trial offers for international shipping services. As customers engage with this content, Data Cloud continuously updates their intent score.

When the customer downloads the customs guide and clicks through to specific country requirements, Data Cloud alerts their assigned sales rep with complete context about their research activity and current shipping patterns, enabling informed conversations about international expansion opportunities.

"Data Cloud enables us to know our customers better so we can partner with them to build their businesses,” says Angela Straub, Director of Solutions, Enterprise Customer, Platform, and MDM. “We can be more efficient through automation and serve it up to improve experiences for customers, reps, and sales alike, ultimately driving top-line revenue."

High-value quotes no longer disappear into the void — they become sales opportunities.

FedEx solved their quote abandonment challenge by monitoring website activity to identify when customers abandon shipping quotes. When a manufacturer visits FedEx's website and requests quotes for shipping automotive parts to three different international destinations, Marketing Cloud monitors their session. The platform tracks how long they spend reviewing pricing options, which services they compare, and exactly where they exit the quoting process.

When the manufacturer abandons their quote, Marketing Cloud waits a couple days to see if the customer eventually ships something. Data Cloud then matches this web behavior with actual shipment data from Databricks using zero-copy integration. If no shipment occurred, Data Cloud recognizes this as a valuable opportunity and pulls together the customer's complete history from
Sales Cloud along with their historical shipping patterns.

For most customers, Marketing Cloud automatically sends helpful emails within minutes explaining customs services, delivery guarantees, and packaging requirements for their specific destinations. For major accounts, Sales Cloud immediately notifies the assigned rep with all the quote details so they can call right away with relevant information about the customer's shipping needs and how FedEx can help with international regulations.

This timely and contextual response turns abandoned opportunities into recovered revenue, dramatically improving conversion rates for high-margin services while providing sales teams warm leads with detailed customer intent data.

Chapter 3The Salesforce Difference