Carrier Advantage

Carriers own and operate the trucks and trailers shippers need to move goods around the country. CH Robinson connects shippers with carriers so maintaining an engaged fleet of carriers is a critical piece of the CH Robinson value proposition.

Maintaining an engaged fleet begins with understanding carrier needs; access to freight, fuel discounts, tire and maintenance programs.

The Carrier Advantage program is designed to invite, activate, onboard at key moments of truth. Once the carrier is fully participating, they are encouraged to maintain status and refer colleagues and friends.

Quality carriers are key to supporting shipper contracts. Shippers want freight to be visible in-transit and they want it to arrive on-time.

Carrier Advantage measures carrier performance according to their in-transit visibility and their on-time performance.

Carrier Representative Participation

Carriers are aligned to Carrier Reps for support. Each time a carrier is issued a new card, the rep is notified automatically with all the account and operational information they ned to support and encourage the carrier. This approach turns out to be more effective than a mass update to all support personnel who may not have carrier with cards.

High-scoring Carrier Advantage Program (CAP) carriers receive earlier access to freight, deeper discounts on fuel and tires and more comprehensive service offerings.

Operational, behavioral and disposition data are monitored and used to trigger messaging and offers as carriers pass through the various stages of the program.

In the first year the program has gone from zero to several million dollars in fuel spend and provided members several hundreds of thousands of dollars in fuel discounts.

Automation

Carriers enter the communication funnel for the program twenty-four hours after they apply to become a CH Robinson carrier. New carrier data is sent to an email scheduler that triggers the first Carrier Advantage invitation email one day after they apply. From there an active cardholder file is used to trigger a nudge to carriers who have not yet signed up for the Carrier Advantage program.

Invite Open rates average 68%, CTR average is 12% and the Conversion average is 7%.

For the nudge invite Open rates average 65%, CTR average is 7% and Conversion average is 4%.

Once carriers enroll, their data is processed to the email scheduler to begin onboarding communication. Carriers are guided, through a series of emails, on how to activate cards, fund and configure cards for use and how to find the best fuel discounts based on their activity.

For the first few months of the program adjustments to timing and messaging of onboarding was made every couple of weeks based on behavior and interviews. Over time, the dashboard began to show desired behavior and modifications were made based on feature updates instead of behavioral insights.

A leading indicator of how to structure onboarding came from data that showed reject codes - why and where card transactions were failing. Over the course of 90 days of onboarding iteration, reject codes reduced by 70%.