How trucking companies can build the digital tools shippers now expect
This is the fourth post in our series on how specific industries can modernize the way they build digital products. We've looked at industrial manufacturing, grocery retail, and electric and gas utilities. This one looks at trucking and freight, where shippers now expect to quote, book and track a load as easily as they order anything else online, and where most of the people asked to build those tools were hired to keep trucks moving.
In April 2017, at J.B. Hunt's annual shareholders meeting in Lowell, Arkansas, CEO John Roberts announced that the company would spend $500 million on technology over the next five years, and that it had already doubled its engineering and technology staff to more than 900 people. His explanation for the spending was, "Customers are demanding greater visibility and information into their supply chain in real time." He also had a warning for the many venture-backed startups now threatening his industry at the time, which was that the companies trying to build these types of services in Silicon Valley had nothing but software (and none of the physical logistics and assets).
Six years later the best known of those startups, Convoy, which had been valued at $3.8 billion in April 2022, shut down its core business. Its collapse had several causes, including a freight recession and an expensive bet on its own trailer pool, but it supports Roberts's point that software by itself doesn't move freight. The carriers still standing own the trucks, the terminals and the driver relationships. They challenge they are now facing is whether the same organization that runs shipping and logistics networks so well can also learn to build software that shippers choose and want to use.
How trucking and logistics companies become successful
Trucking companies are some of the most operationally disciplined businesses anywhere. A carrier knows its on-time pickup and delivery percentage, its cost per mile, its claims ratio, its safety scores and how many hours its tractors sat idle last week. These numbers get reviewed daily. A successful logistics network runs on schedules and terminal handoffs that have been tuned for decades. The people who run it usually came up through dispatch jobs, then terminal management or sales, where the job was to execute a known process a little better and a little cheaper than yesterday.
That discipline is the reason these companies survive freight cycles that kill weaker competitors. It works because the work is well understood, the customer's requirement (pick it up, deliver it on time, don't damage it) is stable, and a new terminal or a fleet of new tractors is a capital decision with a return that can be calculated well in advance of spending any money.
How digital customer experiences challenge the trucking business logic
The same consistent development and optimization playbook gets applied to the shipper’s digital portal and their mobile apps. The project gets a scope (quote, book, track, pull documents), a vendor or an internal team, a launch date and a budget. Once it launches the team moves on and the tools go into maintenance. Success is measured by the launch of the digital tool. Maybe in some orgs the number of logins gets measured as well. Meanwhile, the customer (aka the shipper) keeps emailing customer service for the status of a load because the tracking page shows the last terminal scan instead of an arrival time.
Shippers notice, and they say so in surveys. In Descartes' benchmark study of more than 630 shippers and logistics providers published in June 2024, shippers complained that viewing their shipments as a “truckload” and “less-than-truckload” were terrible views to understand real-time visibility of their shipments. This is a clear user need that has come up year over year and continues to be an issue for the customers of the trucking industry. However, the approach to fixing it and responding to this consistent customer feedback hasn’t been updated inside the trucking companies.
The gap persists because the network and the software are managed with different instruments. A carrier can tell you its on-time percentage to the decimal, but very few can tell you how many calls they had to field because their package tracking page failed to provide the customer’s required information. Similarly, very few of these companies can tell you how many quotes started online and finished on the phone with a rep because the website failed to do so successfully.
Three shifts for a team inside a carrier
Write down the shipper's next decision before the feature. Shippers use a tracking page to decide something, such as whether to warn their customer, reschedule a dock appointment or expedite the next order. Ask the internal product development team (or your vendor) to describe the decision a feature supports and how they will know the shipper made it without calling. "A shipping manager knows by 10 a.m. whether her afternoon pickup is on schedule, without calling us" is a target a team can build toward and test. "Enhanced shipment visibility" is far more vague and less actionable. It describes the software and leaves the shipper out of it.
Put the people who run the network on the team. Dispatchers, customer service reps and terminal managers know every exception that a happy-path design ignores. They’ve spoken to thousands of customers and know that they’re likely to complain about a missed pickup, an appointment that moved, the freight held at a dock or the reweigh of shipment that changed the invoice. Software built without these subject matter experts handles the clean shipments and ends up pushing every exception back to the phone. This is where the customer’s patience starts to run out. A product team that includes someone from operations, and that spends a week listening to customer service calls before it starts building, will find its first quarter of work in those calls.
Measure the software the way you measure the network. Carriers already review operational numbers daily. Give the digital tools numbers that complement and impact those operational metrics. Think about making visible such metrics as the share of loads quoted and booked without a rep, number of calls and status check emails per hundred shipments, and how many shippers who booked online once came back to do it again. Review those numbers with the operations metrics, and treat a feature that doesn't move its number the way you would treat a lane that keeps missing its service standard, by fixing it or retiring it.
None of this asks a carrier to become a technology company. It asks the carrier to apply the measurement habits it already has for the network to the tools shippers use to reach that network.
Where should logistics companies get started
Pick one customer segment, one behavior and one quarter. Small and midsize shippers who book LTL are a good first segment because they generate a lot of status calls relative to their revenue and are often the most willing to self-serve when the tools work. Count the status check calls and status emails that audience generates today and set an improvement target for the quarter. Give one cross-functional team the job of reducing them, and review what changed at the end of the quarter. A team that can show fewer calls per hundred shipments will have more credibility inside the company than any launch announcement.
At Sense & Respond Learning, we help product, design and engineering teams make this shift from output to outcomes, with practical training in product discovery, Lean product management and OKRs. If your carrier is investing in digital tools and shippers are still picking up the phone, we'd love to talk.