How to cut check calls without losing track of the load or the freight

Where track and trace time goes

A load is booked and the carrier is on the way to pickup. From here until the POD arrives, someone on your track and trace desk confirms pickup, gets location updates, adjusts ETAs and appointments, tells the customer and handles whatever goes wrong: a late arrival, a breakdown, a missed appointment or a request to change the delivery.

When the carrier shares tracking through an app or an ELD link, most of that is visible on a screen. When it does not, the desk calls the driver or the dispatcher, often several times per load, and types what it hears into the TMS. Rose Rocket, which sells against the check call, says dispatchers spend hours each week dialing drivers and relaying status updates to shippers.

Customer updates are the other half of the work. Many customers want updates from pickup to delivery, and some want them in their own portal or format. Each update is short, and a busy desk sends a great many of them.

Exceptions take the most time per load. A breakdown means finding out where the truck is, whether the carrier can recover the load, what the receiver will accept and what to tell the customer, often within the same hour. Those loads are the reason a track and trace desk exists, and they deserve more of its attention than routine location checks get today.

What tracking apps already do

Tracking vendors have worked on this problem for years. DAT offers load tracking powered by Trucker Tools and says it can eliminate check calls. Turvo markets its platform as a way to eliminate check calls and the texts and emails that go with them. Trucker Tools says its network covers more than 350,000 unique MC numbers. These are vendor claims, and for a carrier that shares tracking, an app does replace most of the calls.

DAT also says its tracking achieves over 90% visibility compliance on tracked loads. The carriers who never accept tracking sit outside that number, and they are the ones your desk still calls.

What the apps leave behind is the part that still costs hours. Some carriers do not share tracking at all. A location ping tells the customer nothing until someone turns it into an update, and a late or stopped truck still needs a person to decide what happens next.

The work an agent can take

An agent works well on what the apps leave behind. For loads without tracking, it messages the carrier at the agreed times, reads the replies, updates the TMS and asks again when a reply does not come. For tracked loads, it reads the feed and drafts customer updates in each customer's format. When something looks wrong, such as a missed pickup window, a truck that has not moved, a driver who stops answering or an ETA past the appointment, it flags the load to a person with what it knows.

Customer updates can follow rules the customer approves. A routine on-time update can go out under those rules while a person spot-checks a sample. Exceptions go to a person, who decides what to tell the customer.

A named person on your team approves those rules, written down per customer: which events trigger an update, what it says, who receives it and through which channel. A grocery customer with tight receiving windows may want an update every time the ETA moves by more than an hour, while another wants only pickup and delivery. The agent follows each rule and keeps a copy of every update in the load record, so the account manager can see what the customer was told and when.

Treat every reroute as a checkpoint

Track and trace is also where some thefts now happen. In its Freight Fraud Index for the fourth quarter of 2025, Highway described a pattern in which a load is picked up legitimately and then rerouted mid-transit by a spoofed call or an email from a lookalike domain. Highway recommends verifying reroutes with the original trusted contact information and fresh written and verbal authorization before the driver proceeds.

That gives the agent a firm rule. A request to change the delivery address or the consignee never enters the automated path. The agent stops, records where the request came from and routes it to a person with the contact details from the carrier file and the customer file. The person calls those numbers, never the one in the request.

The same rule covers other late changes to instructions, such as a new pickup number or a request to drop the trailer somewhere else. Highway's report recommends treating exception requests like these as verification checkpoints and confirming that the person asking is authorized to make the change.

Appointment exceptions deserve care for a different reason. The Department of Transportation's Inspector General estimated in 2018 that a 15-minute increase in average dwell time at a facility raises the expected crash rate by 6.2%. An update to a carrier should never ask a driver to make up lost time.

Worked example: what the hours look like

This is an illustrative example with assumed numbers, not a client result. Take a brokerage moving 400 loads a week, where 160 of those loads run with carriers that do not share tracking. Each untracked load needs about three check calls at 4 minutes each, so 12 minutes per load. That is 1,920 minutes, or 32 staff hours a week.

Assume the carrier answers the agent's messages on 120 of those 160 loads. A person spends about 1 minute reviewing each of them, so 120 minutes. The other 40 still need calls at the full 12 minutes, another 480 minutes. Total time falls to 600 minutes, or 10 hours, which gives back 22 staff hours a week.

Customer updates sit on top. If every one of the 400 loads gets two updates at 3 minutes each, that is another 40 hours a week, and rules-based updates with a spot check can take most of it. Run the calculator below a second time for updates, with your own numbers.

This example depends heavily on one number, the share of loads already on tracking. A brokerage with 90% of its loads on an app or ELD link will see far less. If your desk also books or moves delivery appointments, count that work separately, because a missed appointment can take more time than every check call on the load put together. Reroute requests stay out of the automated path whatever the numbers say.

Starting small with track and trace

Count one ordinary week: loads that ran without tracking, check calls the desk made, customer updates sent and exceptions that needed a person. Write down which customers want updates and in what form. For each exception, note whether your desk found it first or the customer did. The loads where the customer noticed first are the place for an agent to start.

Then test an agent against last week's loads with nothing sent to carriers or customers, and compare its updates and flags with what your desk did. Our five-day AI Workflow Sprint runs that test on your redacted data and ends with staff hours per workflow and a fixed build quote. It costs $2,500 and the fee comes off the build, with a full refund if we do not find 10 staff hours a week.

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