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Understanding the limits of freight forwarders' liability helps to predict the scope of indemnification to the customer in case of damage or loss of cargo. The absence of international agreements regulating the limit of the liability limit of freight forwarders makes it difficult for customers to find freight forwarders with the most favorable conditions. A large number of factors, such as the type of forwarding contract, the country of registration of the forwarder, the status of the forwarder, existing international agreements, etc. can significantly affect the degree of liability of the forwarder. In this paper, the legislation regulating forwarding and the activities of the multimodal transport operator will be considered. In addition, the standard conditions of the forwarding contract, the most commonly used in the selected countries, will be analyzed. On the basis of the conducted research, a case study will be presented, which will indicate the practical influence of various factors on the liability limit of the forwarder and the multimodal transport operator.

The issue of creating international legislation capable of regulating the sphere of forwarding has been considered for quite a long time. The actively expanding volume of services provided by freight forwarders and the increasing blurring of its role and area of responsibility create problems in the mutual understanding of the participants in the client– forwarder – third party chain. The main obstacle to the implementation of an international legislative act is the difference in the laws and customs of individual countries. To identify these differences, the authors analyzed such factors as the range of services provided by the forwarder, the conditions of access to the forwarding market, the type of representation used by forwarders in the contract and the definition of the boundaries of the forwarder's responsibility to the client. The analysis was carried out by studying national legal acts regulating the field of forwarding, as well as the general conditions of forwarding applied by members of national associations of forwarding and logistics in countries with a civil law system. The greatest difference was revealed in the field of conditions of access to the forwarding market, while the functionality of the forwarder, the types of representation used and the limits of responsibility of forwarders from different countries did not indicate any big differences. The result of the work is the conclusion that there are no critical differences in the work of freight forwarders of countries with a civil law system that can hinder the unification of forwarding conditions.

The current focusing of market on customer comfort wdemands that service providers orienconstantly modernize their structures and methods of operation. Due to the progressive digitization of various areas of business activity it is necessary to know and regularly implement up-to-date technological aids available to maintain competitiveness and build long-term relationships with the client. Delivering products to the point of consumption is an extremely important element in the supply chain and transport companies play the role of both intermediaries and service providers. This article is a framework proposal of a methodological solution for entities dealing with transport services in terms of building long-term relationships with the client with the help of modern technologies and methodologies. The findings show strategies and systems with which transport companies can strive to build a competitive offer in the logistics chain. A process portal was proposed as the target solution as an internet base of the transport offer using big data as a means to optimize the service. The study was devoted to analysing multi-criteria decision-making methods with a view to using solutions in the process of developing methodologies for building customer relations in the field of transport services.

TQM is a term associated mainly with ensuring the quality of production, where the emphasis is on quality in all parts of the production process. The introduction of TQM into the operation of a service company therefore seems to be more difficult. In the presented article we address the basic requirements for the introduction of TQM in a company providing road freight transport. The basic PDCA approach needs to be implemented in all processes of the actors involved in the supply chain. The article points out the fact that evaluating the quality of the provided service only on the basis of a single indicator, which is the monitoring of the number of complaints and claims, is not sufficient as evidence of the established TQM system. The customer requires evidence of long-term and serious monitoring. As part of this monitoring, it proposes the creation of an effective evaluation system for evaluating the quality of the external service provider. To determine the priority requirements of the customer, it is appropriate to apply several known simple evaluation methods. In the article, we applied the pairwise comparison method and the Saaty’s method to determine the order of importance of the quality criteria that we previously found in the customer survey: integrity of the consignment, compliance with the agreed delivery time and completeness of the shipment, including documents. We therefore recommend focusing on these criteria when providing TQM in the company.