How shippers can avoid carrier fall-offs and recover quickly with Convoy

If you are a shipper, you probably know that moment of stress when a carrier backs out at the last minute and leaves you with a hot load to cover. Shippers spend countless hours trying to cover these fall-off loads. With the increased volatility of the COVID-19 freight market, fall-offs are becoming the new normal. Convoy’s technology automates the recovery process to drastically reduce the total number of fall-offs and give shippers peace of mind that their loads will be covered.

Reducing Fall-offs With Proactive Quality Monitoring 

Before Convoy even assigns a carrier to a shipment, each carrier undergoes automated and rigorous quality monitoring that includes up-to-the minute confirmation of compliance status. 

We start by gathering extensive carrier safety and compliance data, and then apply machine learning. Our algorithm processes thousands of inputs—such as carrier on time percentage, fall-off percentage, crash history, app usage, and speeding and traffic violations—across millions of records spanning the past 10 years, ultimately producing individual scores for the tens of thousands of carriers in our network. Then, we use automation to analyze compliance with those scores within seconds, every day, with every load to either qualify or disqualify carriers to haul loads.

Carriers who fail to meet our rigorous standards are automatically put on our “Do Not Use” list. This ensures that every carrier assigned to pick up a load has a proven track record of excellence and is far less likely to fall-off loads.

Mitigating Falloffs Through Automation

Even with all of these quality and compliance processes in place, fallofs can still happen. Drivers may break down or be delayed unexpectedly at a previous pickup. It takes a traditional broker 30 minutes to contact 10 drivers to recover from a falloff. At Convoy we have automated 97% of our brokering process, which gives us the ability to contact up to 10 times as many drivers as our closest competitors in the same amount of time. This speed means that we are able to source a new driver so quickly that shippers never even know there was a falloff to begin with.

Additionally, Convoy leverages GPS tracking to automatically identify whether a carrier will be able to make a pickup. For example, if the Convoy system identifies that a driver assigned to a load is 6 hours away from a pickup scheduled in 3 hours, it will automatically remove the carrier and get to work finding a new coverage option. This happens immediately, removing any human error or bias that can lead to a bad experience for our customer.

Start Shipping with Confidence 

If you are a small shipper looking to book now with our online platform, sign up here. Or, learn more about Convoy and the benefits of using digital freight network.