Four Ways to Help Simplify the Shipping Needs of Small and Medium-Sized Businesses

Small Business Shippers

We’ve talked to hundreds of people working for transportation teams at small and medium businesses.

One of the most common things we hear is that they “wear many hats” and can be responsible for everything from quoting customers, to getting shipments covered, to reconciling invoices.

Convoy helps simplify the entire logistics workflow by providing tools and technology to streamline shipping and logistics for small and medium-sized business shippers. Here’s how;

1. Immediate Access to Thousands of High-Quality Carriers

A time-consuming part of establishing an efficient transportation strategy is finding the right mix of carriers.

For small businesses, this can be tough as it involves a lot of research, trial, and error, and often results in restructuring budgets or routing guides.

With Convoy, businesses get immediate access to thousands of pre-vetted carriers.

Technology does the work of matching your shipment to whichever carrier is the best fit based on the current location, service rating, cost, and more.

Take the guesswork out of tendering shipments by leveraging Convoy’s industry-leading quality and compliance program to ensure the highest quality and most efficient carriers are selected for each shipment.

2. Instant Automated Freight Quotes

The Convoy instant quote tool allows you to get a rate from Convoy simply by providing pickup and delivery information. This saves precious time spent on phone calls, emails, and wait times on hearing back from individual carriers.

Convoy’s automated quote benchmarking feature also compares our quote to market indices and lets you know whether the rate you are seeing is above, below, or about the same as the market average. This is a powerful tool for small businesses that need to compare rates across a variety of different carriers to determine how competitive the rates are and feel more confident about booking.

You can also use the instant quote tool to get a better sense of where the market is. We have seen many businesses using the Convoy shipper platform pull quotes to simply understand where the market is and what they can expect from their network of carriers.

Download Four Ways Digital Freight Networks Improve Shipping for Small and Midsize Businesses

3. Real-Time GPS Shipment Tracking

Another thing that can really eat into a transportation team’s day is tracking down the status of shipments. We have heard from customers that this can take up to three hours per day – a whopping 37% of their total capacity for those who work 8-hour shifts.

Convoy uses technology to not just connect shippers and drivers, but also track drivers as they are moving shipments. All Convoy drivers are tracked via GPS so that you can see your shipment’s real-time status and progress.

This information is accessible to shippers through the Convoy shipper platform. Simply log in and view the real-time ETA of your shipment, plus where your truck is, on a map.

With Convoy, you can also share the tracking and status of a shipment with your customers or anyone else who needs to know the progress of the load through a shareable tracking link.

You can easily insert this live tracking URL into an email, TMS system, or other management tools to extend Convoy’s real-time GPS visibility and shipment status data to your entire network.

Shareable tracking helps you reduce the manual and time-consuming chain of phone calls between carriers, dispatch, and customer service because now all of your partners have access to the real-time shipment status.

4. Automated Freight Insights

Getting insights into your freight can be time-consuming or downright impossible, especially if you use a large mix of carriers. Because technology is at the core of Convoy, every step of a shipment is tracked and measured.

And we feed those insights right back to you!

We deliver personalized freight insights to shippers on their Convoy loads to provide greater visibility across shipments and highlight areas that can reduce costs and improve quality.

Our reports include wait times and detention insights, pickup (OTP) and dropoff (OTD) metrics, facility ratings, incidental breakdowns, and sustainability measures. The more you ship, the better these insights become.

Related White Paper

Four Ways Digital Freight Networks Improve Shipping for Small and Midsize Businesses
This whitepaper describes in detail four ways that digital freight networks are helping small and midsize businesses weather market volatility and improve freight logistics. Download Now!

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