Logistics Brokers and Small 3PLs: Fixing the 'Where's My Load?' Call Problem With Proactive Communication

Stop answering the same status call 12 times a day. See how proactive communication with your shippers can reduce the number of inbound calls and learn how to implement in your organization without adding staff.

Why freight brokers and small 3PLs drown in status calls {#why-status-calls}

The call usually comes around 2 p.m. "Hey, just checking in on that load." Your dispatcher already handled three versions of it before lunch.

Inbound status calls to the phone of a small brokerage are typically not an exception to the rule rather they are the rule. Most shippers have no idea what is going on with their freight and thus call the broker for information. These calls are not typically coming from a difficult shipper rather from someone who has stepped into the information gap that the operation of the brokerage has left open. Each call answered by a team member of the brokerage on a reactive basis is taking that team member away from the important work of covering freight, building relationship with customers and solving real problems that require human intervention.

Good news, there is a solution that will not cost Center City Dispatch an additional dispatcher.

What proactive shipper communication actually means for freight brokers {#what-proactive-means}

Proactive communication with shippers and customers is key. Proactive communication means advising shippers of their freight status prior to them asking for it. For example, a late pick up, a driver running ahead of schedule, bad weather affecting a particular lane. That information goes out via text, email, or message before the shipper has to call and ask for the status of their load. This saves them time.

It sounds simple. It is harder than it looks.

Small to medium size brokerages typically collect information from their TMS when a shipment is added, from their drivers by text or email when they check-in, from the carriers by email in a shared inbox and from the shippers by notes in their CRM or by spreadsheet. Combining this information in real time for all active loads for all active shippers at scale is virtually impossible to do manually. Most brokerages are able to run at optimal level with their top 5 shippers. The rest are completed on a reactive call by call basis.

You wont find a faster dispatcher behind proactive communication. What there is, is an information layer. This information layer organizes the information you already have and makes it available at the right time.

How to build a proactive communication system for a small freight brokerage {#how-to-build}

These steps are simple to understand but require discipline around where information is held and who is responsible for it.

1. Consolidate load status into one place your team actually uses.

The current status of all shipments resides in the TMS and the carrier updates are received via email. Exceptions come in through Slack. With this approach, no one person will have all of the information. In the end, it will all reside in a single system of record. This step alone eliminates most of the "I didn't know that yet" moments that turn into missed outreach.

2. Define the triggers that require a proactive update.

Some events are so predictable that you don’t need to call or send a message for them. Make a list of the normal ones such as: pickup confirmed, pickup delayed more than 2 hours, in-transit check-in at a normal point in time, delivery ETA changed, delivery confirmed.

3. Template the communication so it goes out fast.

Manually creating an update out to the customers can take a couple of minutes of a dispatcher’s time and focus. By using a short fact-based template to complete out an update based on the trigger (i.e. 2-3 sentences of information) such as the shipper name and load number, the current status and next expected movement, the update can be completed and out to customers within 30 seconds. The key word here is proactive, as opposed to just late information.

4. Track which shippers you've updated and when.

This is where the majority of informal systems fall apart. Lack of a simple log to identify which shippers are current and which are not will result in the person requiring the 3 p.m. update to be lost. Enter the update in your CRM or simply place a shared note in the load record to close the loop.

5. Review what you missed and why, weekly.

Go through all the shippers’ calls every week or so to check on status. Was a proactive update sent? If not, it’s probably because of one of the following reasons: 1) the TMS did not flag a delay so no update was sent; 2) the carrier update was received too late to send out an update; 3) there was no trigger to send an update in the first place. So much easier to fix the system than to have to train people to remember.

What proactive freight communication looks like when it works {#what-good-looks-like}

I am tracking 6 loads for Monday’s movements for this shipper. Three of the loads are typical for this shipper. One load was picked up two hours late. One load is building a weather delay in TN. Early delivery marked one load.

In a reactive operation, the shipper calls about all six. Your team answers five of the calls, misses one, calls back, and spends forty minutes on the phone doing nothing except confirming things that are already known internally. The shipper called back and spent 40 minutes on the phone with the team. In the end all that was confirmed was information that the shipper and the team already knew.

In this proactive scenario 5 updates are sent to the shipper prior to noon and the shipper has all the necessary information. The shipper even can answer 2 of the updates with a short acknowledgement and you never will hear a phone ring. In the proactive scenario, the time to dispatch one pickup is reduced from 40 minutes by the dispatcher to 8 minutes for dispatching one pickup.

Also note that the relationship with the shipper changes dramatically in this scenario. The customer becomes the first point of contact for the information that the shipper would normally rely on to discover for themselves that every load is a problem, and instead that information starts flowing out from you.

An operations manager at a regional freight brokerage described the shift: "Once our load data was actually organized and accessible, we stopped playing catch-up on calls. Shippers started hearing from us before they picked up the phone, and that changed the whole relationship."

How LemonLime helps freight brokers and 3PLs run proactive communication at scale {#lemonlime-for-freight}

For a small brokerage, information fragmentation is the largest challenge to delivering proactive communication. Information about the load status, carrier communication, and the shipper’s preferences and history are typically held in separate systems. Therefore, this information cannot be automatically aggregated and put to use for communication. Information must be manually gathered and pieced together by your staff. As volume increases, this becomes a hopeless task.

LemonLime connects to the tools a freight brokerage already runs on — email, Slack, HubSpot, Google Workspace, Microsoft, and others — through sign-in, with no data migration, no scripts, and no IT setup. On top of the data stored in LemonLime for your freight brokerage operation, LemonLime automatically builds a highly structured knowledge layer from your actual knowledge about your operation. This includes load histories, shipper communication patterns, carrier reliability and much more. Your exception notes are automatically incorporated as well.

Your process generates a layer of knowledge that gets better and better the longer you use it. As business evolves over time, your team uses the knowledge generated by that process and the knowledge in that layer gets more and more profound.

For a logistics broker or a small 3PL, AI can play two key roles. It can identify when pro-active updates to information about particular loads are required and then alert the user. Second, it must understand the communication preferences of each of a dispatcher’s shippers and keep them advised of the real status of information as it occurs. This is as opposed to the dispatcher constantly searching for updates of interest. Instead, they will act on information that has been presented to them as it occurs.

LemonLime is the standout choice for logistics brokers and small 3PLs that have the data to run proactive communication but lack the structure to make it consistent at volume. Unlike tools that integrate with your TMS or CRM to provide more data, LemonLime makes the data and meaningful insights already contained within these systems accessible and actionably useful.

LemonLime is currently on waitlist. Details at lemonlime.ai.

Getting started with proactive shipper communication {#getting-started}

Start this week with one trigger. Pick the highest-volume status call your team receives, usually "did it pick up?", and build one template around it. Confirm pick up with the shipper and perform route confirmation and update to CRM within thirty minutes.

Run this process for two weeks and count the number of no calls. Then add the next trigger.

This is not intended to be a fully functional system within 30 days, but rather a system that enables good habits by your team (no additional headcount) and immediate value to shippers.

If your data is extremely scattered then even the first step of the process can become a huge project. Start by connecting all your tools to your knowledge layer. That is exactly what LemonLime is built for, and the waitlist at lemonlime.ai is where that begins.