How ShipBob automated 160,000 carrier claims annually with Prox
Nov 11, 2025
Introduction
Fundamentally, a 3PL's job is delivering packages from warehouse to your door in the shortest time possible. That's the main success metric. It's how they keep clients happy and grow their business.
Most 3PLs store packages in warehouses, pack them up, and hand them to whichever carrier offers the best price for the given delivery window. The worst thing that can happen after handoff? The package gets lost in transit and never reaches the customer.
When this happens, customers are disappointed with the 3PL's service. To maintain good relationships, 3PLs typically credit the package cost back to the merchant out of pocket. Then begins the long, manual process of filing lost package claims with carriers like USPS or UPS to recover that money.
At ShipBob's Scale
When you're shipping tens of millions of packages per quarter like ShipBob, you get thousands of lost packages per month. Filing and tracking claims across different carriers became a massive operational bottleneck:
Tens of different carriers to manage (national ones like UPS, regional ones like OnTrac)
Each carrier has their own submission method (web portal, email, or both)
Different requirements per carrier (invoice attachments, proof of delivery, specific forms)
Wildly different response times (some carriers respond in days, others take 3 months)
No standardized notifications (web portal updates, email, or radio silence)
The biggest problem is claims falling through the cracks. Some never got filed. Others got lost in email threads. Some carriers never followed up. ShipBob had already refunded merchants for these lost packages, but without successful claims, they couldn't recover that money from the carriers who actually lost them. This means the company is actively losing money.
Agents That Own Claims End-to-End
At Prox, we built claim processing agents for ShipBob that handle the entire workflow end-to-end. Each agent owns one claim and keeps working until it gets resolved. That's the sole purpose of the agent's lifecycle. No claims fall through the cracks, and ShipBob gets every penny back.
Getting to Production in 2 Weeks
Our collaboration started by shadowing the team manually filing claims and learning their day-to-day workflow. We discovered that context aggregation (gathering claim details like amounts, recipient addresses, and invoice data) took employees the longest, around 4 minutes per claim. We reduced that to 1 second.
After reading through SOPs and observing the process, we separated the technical work into two sequential parts:
Integrating with ShipBob's software stack
Building agents that use these tools to complete the claims workflow
The first part is the most laborious, but we completed it quickly thanks to ShipBob moving fast and our internal agent building platform tailored specifically for 3PL software integrations. This platform let us reuse workflow and integration templates to quickly connect Salesforce, Microsoft Graph API, AfterShip, ShipBob WMS, and more.
After the tools were integrated, the second part was straightforward - simply turning ShipBob's SOPs into agentic workflows.
Live in Production
0+
Annualized claims capacity
0 hours
of manual work eliminated annually
0 weeks
Time-to-production
The agents run daily at scheduled times, processing batches of claims automatically. They handle:
Invoice Processing. Agents parse invoices and documentation to calculate exact claim amounts. They subtract things like shipping costs, sales tax, and discounts. What used to take employees several minutes per claim now happens instantly.
Carrier Submission. Agents file claims directly through carrier web portals or email, following each carrier's specific requirements. We maintain complete recordings of every submission for visibility.
Edge Case Handling. When invoices are incomplete or claims need human review, agents flag the case in Salesforce so the team knows to intervene. We've transformed the workflow from humans doing repetitive manual work to agents handling the majority and notifying humans only for edge cases.
Proactive Monitoring. Each agent is responsible for its claim until resolution. If a carrier doesn't respond within expected timeframes, the agent sends follow-up emails. Agents continuously monitor carrier web portals and email inboxes for updates, ensuring nothing gets stuck.
The lifecycle of an agent is simple: get this claim resolved and make sure ShipBob gets its money back.
“Before Prox, claims were this constant background anxiety. We knew we were leaving money on the table - claims not filed, emails getting lost and no one follows up with carriers.
Now - Prox agents just handle it end to end. They don’t miss anything, and we actually get our money back while having complete visibility on all the claims.”
Dhruv Saxena
CEO ShipBob
Next Steps
One interesting challenge is the second type of claims — damage claims.
Currently, humans process customer-submitted photos of damaged goods, review invoices, and calculate partial claim amounts. For example, if someone ordered a set of three cups for $30 and two shattered in transit, a human determines the claim should be for $20.
The next step is building an agent that determines damage claim amounts with high accuracy by analyzing images and invoices. Since the filing process for damaged and lost packages is nearly identical, we'll reuse most of the existing workflow and integrate damage claims seamlessly.