We live in a “just in time” world and contracting transports quickly can be the difference between satisfying your client or losing him.
Maybe it’s hard and extreme to hear us say this but, what do you say if you run out of space in your usual provider’s truck?
In this post we will see how important it is for your company to hire transport in the shortest possible time and what options you have to give a good service to your customer always.
Situations that force you to hire transportation immediately
We have all experienced the situation in which a customer places an order that needs to be received as soon as possible. The departments involved are put on alert to satisfy you. And a cycle begins that could be very similar to this one:
- Day 1: Call your usual carrier to ask for the shipping price.
- Day 2: Answer you, hopefully, the next day.
- End of day 2: Calculate your costs and call again to hire the collection.
- Day 3: You confirm it for the next day, leaving the truck a day later.
- Day 4: They collect the merchandise.
- Day 4-5: Exit of the merchandise from the warehouse of the carrier.
Today we are not going to talk about transit times. We will address this topic in another post, later. But those 5 days you have to add 2 or 3 more until it is delivered, depending on the final destination and other variables.
The conclusion is:
It takes 24 hours to give a price and confirm a transport of pallets is to deliver late to our client.
Surely you have identified with this story. But, not to hire transport in a very short period of time, it gets worse in the following situations:
one. Demand peaks caused by the market.
July and December are the months in which we live stressful situations due to the lack of trucks to pick up our goods. It seems that the world ends at this time, right? However, you have other options in the market that help you solve these moments. We tell you a few lines below, in this same post.
two. Parties, bridges and vacations.
These situations are more complicated because there are traffic restrictions for trucks that depend on which country is a holiday. However, advance your pickups or inform your customers, are good solutions so that these days do not affect the service you offer.
3. Temporality of your products.
If your products are seasonal we imagine that you should have days when your store is saturated.
Would not it be a good idea to release those orders as soon as possible? For that, being able to contract transports in the shortest possible time would be of great help.
What options are there in the market to contract transport immediately?
In the international transport of merchandise you can contract transport with the conventional system of a lifetime or take advantage of the technological advantages offered by the Internet and the world 2.0.
- Conventional option to contract transports
Little can we contribute, that you no longer know, to this modality of transportation contracting. It is the one that we have reflected in the example of situations that you can find and that, surely, you live regularly.
Even so, you can manage it in two different ways:
With a price scaling:
If you know how to calculate the price of your shipment, consider if it weighs or cubes your merchandise or if it is preferable to apply linear meters of truck, some time you have won.
This way you do not have to wait for your carrier to quote you a punctual price. Of course, the risk of a calculation error exists.
With punctual prices, spot:
If you prefer not to get entangled in calculating the complicated rates of ground transportation, if you do not want to err in the price that a shipment will cost you, the most probable is that you ask for a punctual price. And maybe you do it to one or several of your trusted logistics operators.
Here you are in the hands of the human factor of the person who attends you. It can give you a quick answer or not. If you wait for two answers, double bet on the availability to assist you, when you need it, of those people.
We know that they will take half a day, with luck, or one, to give you the quote.
In both cases, you are late to your client.
- Technological option to contract transports
New technologies have come to make our daily life easier. At all levels. You use WhatsApp to communicate with your friends, for example, but also with your partners or suppliers.
In your personal life you have clear the usefulness and practicality of, for example, social networks. But in your professional life the innovation made by the companies that are around you, has a positive impact on you.
What is the technological evolution in the freight transport sector?
Think about it a minute …
Do you have tracking? Automatic billing? A platform where you can get your price automatically?
Wait, do not you have a collaborator who offers you