Since this was something brought up as a response to the Transportation Broker Survey Results, I thought I would elaborate on something that I do know to be true.
First to address one of the comments:
Comment by Robert Blair
While a bidding system has its merits, ultimately shippers want to deal with people. They don’t want their freight and its proper handling to become a tracking number in a faceless, paperless and impersonal system.
Shippers may want to deal with people but in all reality, the bigger companies have a series of processes by which they receive their loads and even by how they go down a chain of command in order to end up being brokered by Joe Driver.
A big company will receive a load from say a soda distributor. Do they know it’s going to be a brokered load? No. Someone in customer service handles that part. First checking capacity of their own fleet, then their owner-operators, lease purchase, and power only trucks. Then it is decided if they are confident enough to be able to broker the load out for the shipper. Customer service negotiates the price (which may or may not have been given to customer service set up as a sliding fee scale or perhaps they refer to rates that the broker will want in order to sell the load) and then puts in the company system.
From here, the load is either assigned to a company driver, owner operator (who may be leased onto to the company), lease purchase, or if somone in the brokering department is running a fleet of power only, then that person may grab the load for their power only driver. If the load sits too long (I presume on this part) without being covered, then it is switched over to a broker load. Meaning that now the brokering people have to cover the load.
Should you call the broker and want specific details that may not be listed on the load for the broker to see (such as weight) the broker then has to call customer service who then calls the shipper. If you run power only (some small companies do sign up their small fleets to run power only with companies) and you have an owner operator that is running the power only loads for you add in yet another person. So then you have: owner operator calling his/her company calling the broker calling customer service calling the shipper to find out the weight. Did you follow that?
Some companies do not like for you to call the shipper or receiver directly either and will not give you a telephone for that very reason. So you are stuck with a lot of “go-between” people.
So now you know you want the load. Everything seems right with it so you take it. You are tendered the load and it has a load number. So now the shipper only has to worry about tracking the status of the load on a website, no names or talking involved unless it is with customer service of the company who just brokered you the load. Does the shipper care? Obviously not because this is done a lot with the bigger companies.
So going back to the comment, shippers are already seeing the nameless, faceless, paperless, number only tracking system and do not seem to have a problem with it. Yes it is impersonal, but if it saves the shipper time, I really do not think they are going to care as long as their load gets there on time and without a problem.
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