At times something goes wrong with a shipment and a long-time customer pings you an email, sends a lengthy WhatsApp or text message, or calls you in frustration. They need answers. What’s gone wrong, and what are you going to do about it? Maybe you’ve got an unreliable carrier on your books or you’ve lost sight of a carrier’s performance. ISO tells your account management and carrier teams the full story with a single understanding of how shippers are performing for your customers, getting you back in their good books. If a carrier is underperforming, you can match your long-time customer with more reliable carriers to restore their confidence and trust in you as their freight broker. You can access ISO Scores for all carriers in the ISO network, taking complete control over sourcing and selecting carriers across every lane based on historical performance.
Your long-time customer wins and you make your life easier because you’re better able to:
Measure your performance strengths
Demonstrate your commitment to serving your customers
Source and select reliable carriers
Plus, with ISO’s Power Lane you can access a database of carriers inside and outside your network that perform best across your shipping lanes, giving your long-time customer even more options.
PLAY 1 - Respond to customer inquiries with root-cause analysis for poor or unexpected service
Now, when you receive a scorecard (or an email or phone call) from a frustrated shipper, you have everything you need with ISO to better understand how you can improve your service. Let’s say you get a call asking for a carrier to be removed from a shipper’s freight delivery. You can use ISO to make an informed decision about how to best deal with the situation, and the great thing is, there’s more than one way to go about it. Take a look...
OPTION 1
Search by shipment ID to find out why the service standard was not as expected.
STEP 1: Login to ISO and navigate to the Exceptions tab
STEP2: Drop the shipment ID(s) into the search bar to view that service exception.
STEP 3: Check the record to see what happened and have a chat with the carrier to get their side of the story. Then decide if it’s fair to remove them.
OPTION 2
Use your customer scorecard to evaluate trends.
STEP 1: Login to ISO and navigate to the Customers Scorecard
Search for the Customer in the search bar or
Navigate to the Scorecard tab and filter to the Customer
STEP 2: Use the Carriers tab to take a look at the carrier that the shipper has a gripe with, and understand how the carrier has performed with the customer’s freight over a reasonable amount of time - meaning don’t make a decision to remove a carrier based on a couple of bad freight runs, when 8 out of 10 times they delivered as promised. Click the carrier name to add that carrier as a filter on the scorecard.
STEP 3: Check out the carrier’s performance overall in the “KPI Overview” tab. Are they bouncing loads or missing appointments?
STEP 4: View Lanes, Facilities, and Consignees to see if the carrier is struggling in a specific area or across the board.
STEP 5: Based on what you find, you can take corrective action:
OPTION A: Remove the carrier from the freight and replace it with one that services those problem areas well (lanes, facilities, consignees).
Remove the shipper as a filter and add the lane, facility, or consignee in question as a filter.
Use the Carriers tab to find alternatives across the network that would improve service levels immediately.
💡PRO TIP: If it is a specific lane the shipper needs more out of, and you don’t have a good option in network, use the “Power Lane” toggle to see out-of-network carriers that you can bring in for that customer.
OPTION B: Give the shipper context if the carrier is generally reliable or the service failure was not its fault. You can share a screenshot, or direct access to that carrier’s scorecard, with the shipper if evidence is needed.
PLAY 2 - Share positive performance via shareable scorecards
You’re running a tight ship with your biggest customers with great results, right? Positive performance is something you should be showing your customers. Scorecards serve to strengthen your relationship with your customers, and shippers often leverage them to keep tabs on how you’re handling their business. ISO’s scorecards are collaborative, which means you and your shippers get a universal source of truth for transportation performance measurement, putting everyone on the same page - hurrah 🎉.
But what if your customers don't share scorecards...?
... No problem. If your customer does not have scorecards, or is asking you to be “more proactive” about service in a particular area, ISO gives you the power to measure and share performance with your customers.
Think of this as a “Quarterly Business Reviews (QBR) in a box”. You know what your customer needs from you, and being a partner that is proactively measuring and reporting on your service makes you more transparent and trustworthy.
As an account manager, here’s how you use ISO to share performance:
STEP 1: Log into ISO and navigate to Scorecards or enter your customer in the search bar.
STEP 2: Filter for that customer and desired time frames.
STEP 3: Click export on your KPI Overview tab to show the performance overall for that customer.
STEP 4: Use the “Entity” tabs to understand which lanes, consignees, facilities, or carriers have been particularly problematic. You can also share any relevant scorecards directly with the shipper from these tabs.
Let’s say there is a particular consignee you were asked to proactively improve on.
Use the “Consignees” tab and identify that receiver (or open the filters menu and apply an Origin and Destination filter).
Click on the Consignee to apply it as a filter and head over to Carriers to understand if there are carrier issues you can work with internal stakeholders on.
Example insights:
If you have a carrier hauling lots of volume into that consignee that is well below the ISO network average, you can flag that to your carrier team and point to alternatives in the scorecard that may deserve more freight.
If that carrier is performing poorly for you but generally performs with a very high ISO score for the rest of the network, it may be good to have a performance conversation with that carrier and address issues.
If you don’t have any high-performing alternatives in the network, work with your carrier team to use Power Lane to identify out-of-network alternatives that haul in that lane.
STEP 5: You can use a similar approach to filter and look in Lanes and Facilities to notice any trends and to proactively improve service.
PLAY 3 - Prepare for a quarterly review with a key customer
As an account manager, you likely know the most important shipping locations of your customers’ freight. But freight allocation could be better, right? With ISO, you can make smarter freight-allocation decisions by using ISO data as part of your procurement planning. Let’s say you have a procurement event (RFP or mini-bid) or a quarterly business review with a key customer. You want to go into that process armed with objective data that demonstrates where and why they should be giving you more freight.
You know their biggest production facilities, and their biggest customer facilities.
With that in mind follow the next steps:
STEP 1: Navigate to the ISO Scorecard
STEP 2: Filter for the city or area of their biggest facility as the origin.
STEP 3: Expand using the Radius filter to the desired sourcing area.
STEP 4: Look at the KPI Overview tab. How does your service into that area compare to the industry?
If service is in the top 10 or 25% of the ISO network, you can share that data with the shipper to prove your service is as good as you say and ask for freight.
You can do this exercise for larger regions, specific lanes, or for consignees (not bench-marked) to show where you’re delivering at a level that begs for more business.
PLAY 4 - Evaluate cost to serve on routing guide lanes before you respond to RFPs
During the Request for Proposals (RFP) process, your goal as an account manager is to get the best freight to set you up for success. Easier said than done, right? You need actual market rates on shipping lanes, you need to understand where you are set up to succeed organizationally, and you need to know who your most reliable carriers are on those lanes. These are the key components of a great freight RFP process. But the bigger question is, what does “best freight” even mean?
It means it's Profitable 💵
This is typically freight where you have multiple carriers, so understanding how many carriers you have running that lane in the past (using the Carrier tab and lane filters) is important for how aggressive you want to be.
Here's how ISO can help
STEP 1: Navigate to the Scorecard and filter for a given lane in the RFP for the last year.
STEP 2: Use the “Carriers” tab to see:
How many carriers ran a significant number of loads for you in that lane.
What your overall ISO score is as well as the ISO scores of the carriers on that lane.
The average incremental bounce costs you paid above linehaul for given carriers and for the lane as a whole.