Voice or Email? The Real Answer Might Surprise Your Brokerage

If you’ve worked in brokerage, you know when you’re at a brokerage. A small army of young people wearing headsets standing at a desk with dual monitors and a laptop. And that phone is constantly ringing and the inbox is overflowing. Customers asking if you can handle a load. Carriers asking for load details and checking in on current loads.

It’s a constant battle to stay on top of it - and at most brokerages 30% of phone calls go unanswered and no one even knows how to properly measure if emails are being handled.

So here’s a fun question: what do you think drives more booking activity at the brokerage? 

The phone or email?

If you get 100 carriers calling about a load, how many do you think email about the load? 10, 100, 500?

Write down your best guess then read on.

We recently updated our CoDriver tool so that it can manage inbound phone calls in addition to inbound emails. One of the fascinating things we’ve learned is that across our customers we see a similar ratio of email load inquiries to phone inquiries - 3:1.

In other words, for every phone call you receive inquiring about a load, you get three emails. Phone calls are only 25% of the interest in your loads!

This matters because if you’re not turning every email into a quote you’re missing out on margin, carrier reuse and a deeper understanding of market pricing.

And quotes from email are just as valuable as quotes from a carrier on the phone. We see similar ratios in how often an email or phone conversation turns into a quote (it’s about 1 in 3 conversations lead to a quote). And similar usage rates of those quotes: for every four loads where you get a voice quote (or email quote), you’ll use that quote.

The big difference between voice and email is that we see a much higher share of total loads quoted via email: approximately twice as many loads as voice. Plus, you get a few more quotes per load from email vs. voice (giving you more choice and better pricing). We see that customers get 1.5-2x the number of quotes per load from email vs. voice.

So why do carriers prefer to quote via email instead of voice? We have a few hypotheses. First, folks want to save time and don’t want to risk waiting in a phone tree on hold. It’s easier for an owner/operator or dispatcher to send multiple emails than it is to wait on the phone. Secondly, many carriers don’t speak English as a first language; the ability to communicate asynchronously via email is easier than working on the phone.

Make sure your brokerage isn’t leaving quotes behind. Talk to your Parade rep about CoDriver.