Check Call
A phone call made solely to learn or relay the status of a load — customer to carrier, dispatcher to driver, or broker to both — because no automated status source exists or is trusted.
How it works — and why it matters
Check calls are the manual fallback of freight visibility: the customer calls because the last update is hours old, and dispatch calls the driver to learn what telematics already knows. Each call is only minutes, but multiplied across loads and days they become a measurable share of dispatcher and customer-service payroll — one of the clearest labor line items in a carrier's back office.
The durable fix is removing the reason for the call rather than answering it faster: a continuously updated ETA published automatically through the channels each party uses — EDI 214 for contracted partners, API for visibility platforms, email or portal for everyone else. Proactive delay notifications matter most, since a customer told about a problem before discovering it experiences service rather than failure.
Related terms
See it in practice: Tranztec Predictive ETA Tracking — automated customer updates →