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    Small Motor Carriers: Customer Service
    Small Motor Carriers: Customer Service
    Small Motor Carriers: Customer Service
    Ebook50 pages45 minutes

    Small Motor Carriers: Customer Service

    By Timothy D. Brady

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    About this ebook

    So what constitutes five star, superior customer service in the trucking industry? When a satisfied shipper congratulates you on that 'great outcome.' But those great outcomes don't come easy. The pressure to meet each drop-dead deadline is on you, the owner-manager, as the 'truck stops here' blame or praise becomes reality on a daily, weekly, monthly basis.
    You determine when the weather's too bad to risk your drivers, your trucks and the shippers' livelihoods. You make the decisions for hiring and firing drivers and office staff, as well as when or whether to expand to more trucks or shipping lanes. You need a lot more help in making those tough calls besides pulling out a coin and flipping it to determine an outcome.
    Sometimes one of your drivers has the entire six months' struggle and labor of a start-up factory's workers loaded into his trailer. And at this point, Customer Service doesn't just mean driving carefully and invoicing correctly. It entails a little hand-holding with a nervous dock foreman, a lot of reassurance to the workers and extreme logistics research with the factory manager beforehand. So how do you learn to do all of that - before your truck heads to the dock?
    Answers are in the first book in the Small Motor Carriers series, "Customer Service."
    Your small motor carrier has a reputation of providing the utmost in customer service to every one of its shippers, whether they're large-volume dry goods, weekly farm produce or the twice-every-three-years welded art sculpture customer.
    This newest book from TruckersU will help you build your shipper base, keep customers happy, and take your small carrier to the great success you envision. Here are tips on not just packing and loading, but creating carefully-tailored logistics plans with each of the shippers you've decided to keep.
    To your success!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWrite Up The Road Publishing & Media
    Release dateMar 13, 2015
    ISBN9781939539250
    Small Motor Carriers: Customer Service
    Author

    Timothy D. Brady

    Brady is knowledgeable, inspirational, motivating, and empowering in his presentations. He's an expert on driver retention, operations, sales and marketing, highway safety, and general business practices. His expertise was acquired during 25 years in the trucking industry, in positions ranging from company driver to owner/operator to small trucking company business owner. Along with previous experience in sales and business management and 30 plus years as a licensed fire and casualty insurance agent, Brady truly has a well-rounded wealth of experience and knowledge. Add his passion for teaching and his desire to help others in the trucking industry, and the package he presents is unbeatable. Specialties: Small Trucking Company Turnarounds Best business practices for small motor carriers. Load planning, Freight lane development Marketing Safety Reducing truck driver turnover. Solutions to owner/operator and company driver issues. Trucking's impact on small communities.

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      Book preview

      Small Motor Carriers - Timothy D. Brady

      Small Motor Carrier

      Customer Service

      by Timothy D. Brady

      © 2015 Write Up The Road Publishing & Media

      A TruckersU Book

      Smashwords Edition

      ISBN: 978-1-939539-25-0

      Dedication:

      We here at TruckersU hope this eBook

      makes your trucking life a little easier;

      your drivers' lives and those of your staff better,

      and your profits bigger.

      Good luck, good roads, and good loads

      From the driveway to the service bay, as the owner/manager of a small motor carrier, its success is your responsibility. Your trucking company is part of the backbone of America, as your efforts help move billions of dollars' worth of freight every year. This book is designed to help you manage the day-to-day workings of your carrier to create the success you envision.

      Table of Contents

      Chapter 1: Predictions for Shipping Costs

      Chapter 2: What Can a Smaller Carrier Offer Shippers?

      Chapter 3: Some Thoughts from Your Shippers

      Chapter 4: Same-Day Delivery

      Chapter 5: Keeping Shippers

      Chapter 6: Replacing Shippers

      Chapter 7 Points for Customer Service

      Chapter 1

      Predictions for Shipping Costs

      A still-growing trend is for shippers to scrutinize their costs for transporting goods and products very, very carefully. Supply chain industry experts figure more and more companies of every size have the need to control costs in the still-sputtering economy – and shipping is the major cost they feel they can control.

      Where does that leave your small carrier?

      Well, knowing you're probably not going to just quote rates but also have to justify them means you'll be increasing the length of your sales calls. You may also lose some business to competitors (especially if they decide to undercut each other), bidding lower and lower until everyone's running in the red just to haul that particular shippers' products or goods. Your carrier doesn't need to get in on the race to the bottom.

      So why the squeeze on shipping rates? Tight profit margins have gotten cut even closer to the bone:

      Production costs are influenced by whether and how much a factory is automated commodity prices have soared.

      In many instances companies hold such slim inventories there aren't really warehousing or storage fees to cut from their budgets..

      It's also true that customer demand can be fickle at best, and the availability of free or low-cost shipping for online purchases is also cutting into the profit margins for bricks-and-mortar retail stores.

      What's coming in the near future? You're going to see more of your shippers using software to schedule their shipping; Transportation Management Systems (TMS) are a hot item now. Shippers may ask you to stick to a route their TMS software has pre-selected as being the most cost-effective. If your driver veers from the plan, you may have to file a written report documenting the route change and proving it was necessary.

      The design of their packing may change dramatically, from getting more units on each pallet, loading more pallets into each trailer that leaves their warehouse, or choosing different carton sizes so more of them fit snugly in shipping containers. Don't be surprised if some of your biggest shippers invest in 'trailer loading optimization programs' as well.

      Your pre-emptive strikes for some of these shippers' cost-cutting solutions? Just what you've been doing all along – only do it better, faster, more tailored to the individual shipper – that old standby, customer service

      Know your shipping customer. Pay special attention to your smaller shippers, who may not have the big bucks to invest in fancy cloud-based software – but need to pack every inch of your trailers as tightly as they can. If you've got a dispatcher that truly knows how to cube out a load, keep that

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