Are you reusing carriers? Here’s why it should be a priority in your brokerage’s strategy.
Most freight brokerages see that there are advantages to reusing carriers, but oftentimes, it’s not a strategic priority. There are several benefits to carrier reuse, some that brokerages may not have even factored into their strategy, though.
Here are some benefits of carrier reuse that might convince even brokers who are happy and successful with their current priorities to make a push to reuse more carriers.
Benefits of Carrier Reuse
You Spend Less Time Onboarding Carriers
Onboarding carriers can be a time-consuming process, even with today’s modern automated onboarding services like RMIS and MyCarrierPackets. The onboarding process itself is faster than ever, but when you must do it for a new carrier on every load, the time spent still adds up quickly.
You Save Money
Time is money, and that’s just as true (and maybe even more so) in the freight brokerage business as it is everywhere else. When you spend less time onboarding carriers, you have more time to spend building relationships with your preferred carriers and getting more loads covered.
Carrier reuse can also help you save money by securing better pricing from carriers when you give them steady business or a high volume of loads.
You Build Loyalty with Preferred Carriers
When you do business with carriers over and over again, you begin to build a loyal relationship. They know they can count on you for repeat business in a lane, with freight, and with equipment that works for them. You know you can count on them to offer you capacity when and where you need it.
Think about it from a real-life perspective. When you’re loyal to someone, you go out of your way to help them out when you’re able. Loyal carriers are more likely to help you get a load covered, even if it means stretching themselves a little thinner than they’d like, either capacity-wise or budget-wise.
Reused Carriers May Help Improve Customer Experience
Sometimes you send a new carrier into one of your shippers and they just don’t have a clue what’s going on. Maybe they’re confused about pickup procedures, they’re unsure about what paperwork they need, or they have trouble finding safe parking nearby. Truck drivers face a lot of issues, and when truck drivers experience problems on the road, the carrier they drive for and your shipper are likely to have issues, too.
Every brokerage has been there. It can cause a lot of headaches for your shipper, your driver, your carrier, and broker representatives. Headaches, and potentially accessorial charges that weren’t strictly necessary, too.
Imagine if you were able to send a carrier to the same shipper time and time again. Those problems would diminish as they become familiar with one another. Your shippers have a better experience and your carriers do, too.
With Such Obvious Benefits, Why Aren’t More Brokerages Doing This?
We’ve talked about why it makes sense to reuse carriers, but not what’s holding a lot of brokerages back from doing just that. Why aren’t they taking advantage of these benefits?
Here’s why. It’s hard. The systems and processes that many brokerages use don’t make it easy. They’d spend almost as much time tracking down carriers for reuse as they would onboarding a new one, and that makes following processes that prioritize carrier reuse seem unimportant to broker reps.
Reusing carriers isn’t a simple process in many brokerages, but technology can change that. Parade can make it easy for them to reuse carriers and reap all the rewards that come along with it.
How Does Parade Make Carrier Reuse Possible?
Parade’s digital freight matching platform not only helps brokers find the best carrier for the job but also helps them find a carrier they’ve already used so they can avoid onboarding a new carrier and build better carrier relationships.
It makes it easy to work with carriers, no matter how they prefer to do business, whether it’s by email, through the carrier portal, or even via load boards, where Parade customers can show their loads strictly to their network of trusted carriers.
In a webinar hosted by FreightWaves, our Head of Product Lindsay Watt and our customer FreightSaver’s CEO Ryan Renne talked about how Parade is helping FreightSaver reuse carriers, therefore building great relationships with carriers and gaining access to more capacity where they need it most. You can watch the webinar on-demand here or read about it on our blog here.