If you’re like most freight brokers and 3PL owners, you know that capacity demand and freight rates cycle through ups and downs. It’s no secret that right now is one of those up periods in which freight rates and demand for trucking capacity are very high. If your goal is to expand and grow your business during this up period, you may be struggling to do so in the current environment due to inflation and the nation-wide labor shortage. Fortunately, there is technology available that can help transportation companies like yours scale and grow without necessarily adding to your head count. In this blog, we uncover how digital load booking technology like Trucker Tools’ Book It Now® can help you scale up your business without increasing your overhead substantially or hiring on new employees.
1. Book It Now® Reduces Manual Processes
When you post a load as a Book It Now® load to Trucker Tools’ Smart Capacity platform, it must include all of the details on the load, including your preferred rate. You can give specific carriers of your choosing access to Book It Now® loads or make them available to a broader base of carriers. Posting a Book It Now® load within Smart Capacity gives carriers the ability to book your loads via Trucker Tools’ free, web-based carrier platform and owner operators the ability to book your loads via Trucker Tools’ free mobile app. Book It Now® automates the load/truck booking process for you and your carrier partners, which greatly reduces manual communications between your team and your carriers.
2. Greater Efficiency Offers the Ability To Move More Volume
Trucker Tools’ Smart Capacity and Book It Now® integrate with your TMS, which means when a carrier or owner operator books one of your Book It Now® loads, it’s automatically scheduled in your TMS. Automating carrier rate confirmations and appointment setting with Book It Now® frees up your team members’ time. The time regained with Book It Now’s® process automation can be used to broker additional load volume. Book It Now® creates new opportunities for additional loads — without the need to hire on additional staff. Freight brokers like Surge Transportation have made Book It Now® an integral part of their growth strategy.
“We’re a fast-growing company,” said Omar Singh, CEO and founder of Surge Transportation. “With Trucker Tools’ load tracking and Book-It-Now®, we won’t have to hire more people to grow. We will be able to double the freight we broker with the team that we have in place now.As we grow, if we can keep the same number of employees that will have a huge impact on the company and our profitability.”
3. Concentrate Human Resources on Service
The ability to up your customer service game is crucial if your goal is to scale your freight broker or 3PL business. However, making phone calls all day and having the same conversation with different carriers over and over isn’t necessarily the best use of your employees’ time. If you transition even just some of your loads to Book It Now® loads, you can let Book It Now® handle rate confirmations and appointment setting and reassign some of your team members to focus on providing top-notch customer service. An added benefit of this approach is that your team members aren’t stuck doing the same repetitive tasks over and over every day. Instead, they’re concentrating on building meaningful relationships with and providing great service to shippers, which may improve employee retention.
4. Book It Now® Makes You Easy To Do Business With
As BlueGrace Logistics’ Chief Operating Officer Mark Ford noted in a recent webinar, the technology that you use in your operations can make you easy or difficult to do business with in the eyes of owner operators and carriers.
“The relationship with a carrier starts with what kind of freight you have available, but it also bleeds down into how you operate, how easy it is for a carrier to do business with you and how that helps them interact with their employees,” Ford said.
Implementing automated load booking tech like Book It Now® makes it easier for carriers to do business with you. Book It Now® gives owner operators and carriers anytime access to your loads. They can search for and book your loads at times that are most convenient for them, not just during standard office hours when your team is available to answer the phone. Book It Now® also greatly reduces the number of phone calls that carriers receive from your team, which in turn can boost their operational efficiency.
5. Book It Now® Can Increase Carrier Engagement
You also can use Book It Now® strategically to keep current carriers engaged with your team and to attract carriers from outside your current network. Many of the freight brokers and 3PLs that have implemented Book It Now® offer the prospect of convenient digital load booking as an incentive to drive carrier engagement. It makes sense: if you’re easy to transact business with, many times drivers and carriers will be more inclined to keep running your freight. It’s worth noting that a recent Trucker Tools survey confirmed this notion, with 66 percent of the owner operators and small carriers surveyed saying that the technology that a broker uses influences whether or not they accept loads from the broker.
Don’t miss Seven Ways Broker Advantage Can Strengthen Your Carrier Network.
Schedule a free demo of Trucker Tools’ Smart Capacity, including Book It Now®.
