With this tentative agreement in place, you dispatch a truck and deliver the load. After sending the invoice, the customer bickers over the rate, fuel surcharge and accessorials and delays payment until the issue is resolved.
This situation could have been resolved quickly if the customer had signed a rate confirmation sheet. In an effort to please the customer, you skipped the process of obtaining a signature in person or by fax machine.
If you have ever experienced similar documentation problems, you’re not alone. Last year, management of the Celadon Group, one of the largest longhaul carriers in the nation, decided that getting rate contracts signed quickly was an area that needed improvement.
Like many carriers, Celadon uses Microsoft Excel and Word to create rate sheets and contracts. Its sales representatives were e-mailing files to customers directly from Celadon’s homegrown customer relationship management (CRM) system. The system kept a correspondence record of rates and acceptances.
“We used (e-mail) as a backing to a rate we gave out,” says Chad Hoffman, pricing manager for Celadon. What the company lacked was a process for capturing signatures in the same time frame. In many cases, sales representatives were delivering papers to customers in person and then e-mailing PDF images of the signed originals back to Celadon’s central office in Indianapolis.
This process took weeks, even months, to get rate contracts signed and fully executed. Last year, Mike Gabbei, Celadon’s chief information officer, saw a solution when he “e-signed” a contract with a technology supplier.
