Setting Expectations with Carriers

I Told You to Do That, Right?

Let’s set the stage for this blog post by looking at a specific scenario:

Say you book a carrier on a load that picks up on Tuesday.  It’s an easy load that picks up from 0800-1700 FCFS and you find a great carrier that can pick it up mid-morning.  You lock down the carrier, but forget to tell the carrier about a very specific company policy…

Your company has a policy that says if a carrier can’t provide driver information by 0900 the day of pick, you have to find a new truck.

(you can nitpick this policy, but let’s just go with it so that this example works)

0900 Tuesday rolls around and you have a problem – the carrier hasn’t given you driver info yet.  Your dispatcher is out of the office until 1000 and nobody else in their office is able to help.

Following the company policy, you bounce the original truck, put a new truck on the load, notify the original carrier and at 1000 you get a call from the original dispatcher.

Believe it or not, he’s pissed about being taken off the load.

Who’s at Fault?

At this point, a lot of brokers like to blame the carrier.  The dispatcher wasn’t in the office, they didn’t have the necessary information, they didn’t communicate well, etc.

The problem is that this is almost entirely the broker’s fault.  

We can dance around and say that the carrier should have been able to provide driver information upon request and there’s some validity to that.  I’m not saying that the carrier did everything perfectly.  However, the bigger problem is that the broker had a company policy that the carrier NEEDED to know about in order to adequately service the load and that policy wasn’t disclosed to the carrier.

The broker failed to adequately set expectations with the carrier and you can’t fault a carrier for failing to meet expectations that they didn’t even know about.

Setting Expectations

If you look at some of the disputes your company has with carriers, I guarantee some of them are because of a failure to set expectations:

• The carrier losing their mind about fees for a missed delivery…did the carrier know about those fees upon booking?
• The carrier who calls at 0200 a lumper…was it clear that the carrier would be responsible for payment?
• The carrier arguing about detention fees…were they told upfront that you only pay $x/hour?

If the answer is “no” to any of these questions, you’re dealing with an avoidable problem, resulting from a failure to set expectations upon booking.

Look back at the original example – think about how it would have played out differently if you told the carrier upon booking that you’d need driver information by 0900 the day of pick.  More than likely they would have just given you the information the day before, but in the event that they didn’t, you can now point to their failure to comply with a known policy and probably avoid an argument about pulling them off the load.

By simply doing a better job of setting expectations with your carriers, you’ll decrease the amount of avoidable problems you have to deal with every single day.

Sync Logistics Training

If you found this interesting, check out what we’re building at Sync Logistics Training.  We cover this topic and more in our coursework on Carrier Sales.

Reach out to nick@synclogisticstraining.com for more information.