The word visibility gets tossed around in the brokerage industry, but what does that really mean? To some, that might imply external load tracking, but is that really 100% visibility? Is your business really only about watching freight move down the road on a little map?
Visibility should be mean the ability to watch your entire business from the 30,000 foot view. You should have visibility into where your current quotes are in the sales process, what the going rates are from your partner carriers, which carriers have historically been better for you, the status of every order in your system, and of course where your loads are at the moment – this is a given.
So how does one truly achieve 100% visibility to their operations, their partners, and their loads? We have spent a lot of time asking ourselves this question as well as talking with brokers to see what they really need. The answer comes down to bringing the right tools to the job.
Your core business success rest on your relationship with your customers – so let us start there. In order to truly provide visibility to your customers, you need a place where customers can interact with you instantly, a customer portal in which rates and potential business can be communicated between teams in real-time. A customer portal allows you to strengthen communication with your customers therefore making it easier to satisfy their requests and inevitably building a much stronger business relationship.
So you have accomplished visibility to your customers and streamlined the ability to handle their requests, but this doesn’t help unless you are able to quickly process the quote requests you are receiving. You need a tool that allows you to receive rates from your carriers and get quotes back to your customers immediately. In order to accomplish this, you need to be directly connected to your carriers so you can pull rates instantly and from multiple carriers at the same time.
Now that you have 100% real-time visibility to your customers, carriers, quotes, rates, and bids, it is finally time to begin tracking the actual loads in motion. There are several solutions on the market that utilize a driver’s cell phone’s built in GPS to provide location data, but what you really need is a service that provides the driver a very simple onboarding process, automates arrival / departure status updates through geofencing, and is fully connected with your systems. This is the only true way of ensuring the data is making it back to you as well as your customers.
At Tranztec, we listen, and listening to our customers and better understanding their needs and requirements before suggesting or crafting a solution has been a core element to our success over the past 20 years. When we built our VIA platform from brokers, we truly took the time to listen for years before writing the first line of code. We proudly stand behind our belief that our product truly provides the best toolset on the market for providing complete visibility to brokers.
Although the product has been live for several years now, we continue to listen to our customers, and their feedback comes in the form of updates to our product every single month. It is our mission to change what brokers feel 100% visibility actually means, and it is something we strive to improve every day.
We hope you enjoyed this blog, if you want to learn more about Tranztec or VIA, we would love to hear from you through our instant chat, social media, contact page, or phone.
You can also keep up to date on everything Tranztec by subscribing to our newsletter.