Many medium and large freight brokerages are looking to achieve business breakthroughs by leveraging the right technologies. By leveraging the right technology, brokerages can reduce grunt-work, streamline workflows, and scale engagement. For example, if you double the throughput of your best broker reps, you can save yourself on making an additional hire.
However, every freight brokerage has a unique set of operational requirements, such as workflow processes, fulfillment opportunities, and booking-structures. Therefore, one-size-fits-all tech-solutions do not exist; brokerages must apply technologies in a way that suits their unique operational requirements and business goals.
Without getting clear on your unique business needs and what a technology solution can (or can’t) do, your brokerage is at risk of investing in a solution that:
Requires significant, time-intensive adjustments to your work processes.
Requires a long ramp-up time, which is costly.
Delivers short-lived results.
Your team won’t use to improve the way they work.
In this post, we discuss the five qualities of what we believe to be robust technology solutions. What we share will assist you to enhance your freight brokerage business rapidly, and reduce your business risks during adoption and implementation phases.
1: Customized to Fit Your Business
Let’s suppose you have an automated system that can engage 1000s of carriers at once, inviting them to book loads. A carrier might look at the load opportunity and decide if they want to reach out to the broker and quote for the load using either email or phone. How does the carrier know who to contact? How do you know the right person will receive the correct email? A carrier should be able to book a load opportunity by contacting the right broker representative directly.
At Parade, we make sure that every email sent to carriers has the correct personal contact information in your brokerage. While assigning the right contact information sounds simple, almost trivial, ensuring the right contact information is provided to each carrier helps reduce booking friction. Because if a carrier has to be rerouted multiple times to book a load, it is unlikely that that carrier will book that load.
2: Fast On-Boarding
The faster you can get your team to use the tech solution, the quicker you can gain your return on investment. However, training existing staff on how to use a new technology solution can consume a lot of time. Therefore, the ideal tech solution should be intuitive, simple-to-use, and require no user manual.
At Parade, we pride ourselves on having developed tools that are intuitive to use. Our brokerage users may not even see our technology interface. Instead, they simply notice more inbound calls and emails from carriers wanting to book loads. In effect, they don’t need to learn anything new to perform better at their jobs.
For example, within a month, a customer with Parade-enabled CSRs booked 150% more loads than their peers who weren’t using Parade. From ‘Day 0,’ our technology was already profiling every carrier in their network, and tripling the number of network carriers engaged.
3: Proven Track Record of Success
You don’t want to fall victim to a mediocre product that is well-marketed. A technology solution must be proven to work for your specific needs. To verify this, we always recommend you:
Review their case studies.
Request a live demo.
Get testimonials from their existing clients.
Test your technology vendors to ensure they understand the nuances of running a freight brokerage.
Parade, clients have grown their business significantly, streamlined their operations, and strengthened their reputation in the market:
2.5X more loads booked.
3X increased engagement of inactive carriers.
30% increase in loads per carrier.
4: Adaptable to Changes
How does a technology solution respond to business-sensitive changes in the marketplace, such as spot prices, regulations, freight needs, new technologies, and changes to load supply and demand? What worked for your business last week won’t necessarily work this week. At Parade, we are always taking in new data and learning in real-time and listening to our customers’ feedback to make continuous improvements to the changing landscape.
5: Secure from the Start
Technology solutions like Parade require the client to grant access to granting access to the client’s sensitive, proprietary data (e.g. your carriers and load opportunities)technology partners in order to provide the most accurate insights for processing and performing work on company-sensitive data (e.g. your carriers and load opportunities). However, your valuable data cannot end up in the hands of competitors or malicious actors who may use it to breach the trust of (or even steal) your carriers and customers. Therefore, you want a provider who has a comprehensive data privacy and protection plan. Our CTO, Tony Wu, covers how we set up security from the first day with our customers in another post.
In Summary
A robust tech solution can help your freight brokerage achieve results as quickly as possible, recover your cost of investment quickly, and gain multiples on your investment into the future.
However, such a solution requires 1) A strong understanding of the nuances of running a freight brokerage, 2) Strong technical expertise. At Parade, we collaborate with brokerage management teams to ensure we understand their unique operational needs and expectations; helping them achieve breakthrough results from ‘Day 0.’