Logistics & dispatch
Half past four on a Friday, and the other line is one of your drivers.
It gets traffic the brief, not a promise.
It picks up on the second ring, works out whether it's a customer or one of your own vans before it says anything else, and leaves a fully specified consignment in front of traffic. It promises no vehicle and no time, because the board does that and the board is yours.
Free for 14 days. No card needed.
“Machine's down at Wednesbury. Part's sat in Redditch. Can you have it here by five?”
Takes both postcodes, the pieces, the weight and what's taking it off at each end, then pages traffic with the deadline on it. It does not say yes to five o'clock. The man holding the board says that, once he has seen which vehicle is free and what hours the driver has left on his card.
Half past four on a Friday, and the other line is one of your drivers.
Their words
Say it the way your callers say it, and watch what it reaches for
The agent has fourteen tools. It has the same fourteen on every one of these pages — what changes with your trade is which one a sentence lands on, and how much of the job is done by the time it puts the phone down.
It hears
“it's Baz, I'm on the drop”
It reaches for
transfer_call
Matches the number to your saved contacts and puts him through. A driver never queues behind a price shopper.
The words on those chips are the trade’s, not ours: collection, consignment, consignee, dedicated, tail lift, pallet network. Get one of them wrong on the phone and the person on the other end knows within a sentence.
Run it
Every line on the job card came from a second you can point at
One call, on a rail. Drag it forward and it fills in. Drag it back and it comes apart — the slot empties, the tool leaves the log, and the confirmation un-writes itself.
Agent
Salter Transport, traffic office — you're through to the answering assistant. Is this a driver, or a collection?
Tools it ran
- Nothing yet — it is still listening.
Consignment
- Consignor
- Consignee
- The load
- With traffic
Nobody promised her a van. The brief is complete, Lorna has it in writing, and Gurdip's phone went before the call ended.
Played back in 14 seconds, or listen to the whole call (1:34) at its own pace. The clock on the rail keeps the written call’s time.
Build this agentThe wall
It will not promise you a vehicle, or a time it will be there
Lean on it. The words change as the caller pushes; the answer does not. Push all the way and the only thing that gives is that it stops arguing and fetches a person.
Pressure 1 of 4
Caller
“Straight answer. Can you have a van on my yard by half four, yes or no?”
Agent
I can't put a vehicle against a time — I've no sight of the board and I don't know where your nearest driver is. What I can do is have the whole brief in front of Gurdip before you've put the phone down.
One person on this number can promise a vehicle by half four, and it is never the agent. What crosses the wall is the brief, reaching him while the caller is still on the line — and the caller behind it, if he would rather argue about half four with the man who is allowed to say it.
The relay
Traffic — whoever has the board, or the owner's mobile after 17:30 knows in 8 seconds
Half the traffic on this number is not a customer. Your own driver — stood at a gatehouse that won't issue him a pass, or on a drop where there is no forklift and they are refusing to take it off — goes through to a human before the agent asks him a single question. So does anyone ringing about damage, an accident or a claim. Neither of them waits behind a price shopper, which is the whole reason this line loses work. The transfer is the first move every time; if it doesn't connect, the same facts are saved as a message the team is told about there and then. There is no third step, because a driver at a gate does not need a text — he needs somebody picking up.
0.0s
The caller is still talking. They never hear a hold, and they are never told to ring back.
Your rules
It starts briefed for your trade. The brief is yours to change.
Your trade decides what it knows on day one. You decide the rest — and every line you change shows up in how the next call goes, not in a settings page nobody reads.
My drivers never wait behind a customer
It matches the number against the contacts you have saved before it says anything else, and a driver hears a person, not a hold tone.
Every figure carries the conditions of carriage
The band and the conditions arrive in the same sentence, and again in the text, so a rate discussed on the phone is never a rate discussed on its own.
After 17:30 wake me for a stopped line
Off. The call goes ahead without it.
Same agent, your vocabulary. The trade seeds the prompt; everything after that is yours, and you can read the whole of it in the dashboard rather than guessing at what it was told.
Go live
A number of its own, briefed for your trade, this afternoon
Everything on this page works on some plan. Here is exactly which, so nothing you just watched turns out to be behind a wall you did not know about.
On any plan
Nothing to connect beyond saving a contact and adding your documents.
- Puts the caller through to a person
- Knows the date, your hours and the caller's number
- Writes down the details you asked for
- Takes a message, in the caller's words
- Answers questions from your own documents
- Tells your team, during the call
Starter — $49 a month
Needs a text-capable number on your account.
- Texts the caller a confirmation
Pro — $249 a month
Needs Google Calendar connected. Until it is, these calls become messages instead.
- Finds an existing booking to change
- Reads your real diary before it offers anything
Your agent gets a new number; we cannot port your existing one, so the new number sits alongside your line and you forward to it when you are ready. Local numbers only — no mobile or toll-free yet.
What you just proved
Six claims. You operated the ones that are filled in.
- Three kinds of call come in, and it knows which is whichTry it
- It understands how your callers actually talkTry it
- Every line on the paperwork came from a second of the callTry it
- It will not say the thing that would land you in troubleTry it
- When it can't finish a call, a person knows while the caller is still thereTry it
- The brief is yours to changeTry it
The one we did not demonstrate
About one call in five, and nearer one in three between three and five
Our figure, not a study. Our estimate, and it has to be, because nobody measures this trade: the RHA, Logistics UK, BAR and the Institute of Couriers publish no answer rate for hauliers, couriers or removers, so a vendor who quotes you one for this industry has invented it. Ours is arithmetic off the shape of the day — one line, one pair of hands, and everybody else's cut-off landing between four and six, which is the same ninety minutes the dispatcher spends re-planning the two jobs that already went wrong. After half five it is a mobile on a worktop, and the rate goes up again. Don't take ours: pull last Friday afternoon off the handset and count it yourself.
About £20 a call — nearer £180 for one answered at night
Our figure, not a study. Our arithmetic, and every step of it is yours to argue with. Roughly four calls in ten carry no revenue at all: your own drivers, subbies, suppliers and people chasing a consignment you have already been paid for. Another one in seven is an existing customer moving a job he has already given you — worth a lot, counted here as nothing. That leaves about 45% that are a genuine new enquiry. A job averages about £150 and we put conversion at 30%, deliberately under the close rates the moving-software vendors publish about their own customers, which we have not printed because we could not put a date or a sample against them. £150 × 45% × 30% is £20. The out-of-hours call belongs on its own line: the caller with a stopped line at half past ten has already tried everyone and has stopped asking about price, so a £300 job converting better than one in two is the £180. The figures stay in pounds because the £150 underneath them is a pound figure, and a dollar version of it would be an exchange rate pretending to be research. Nothing annualised. Your call mix is your own, and a total we invented from it would be the first thing a transport manager could disprove.
- A rate discussed on the phone without the conditions attached is an exposure, not a sale.
- Road Haulage Association, RHA Conditions of Carriage 2020, 2020. Not research and no sample: this is the published carriage conditions themselves, the edition in force from 1 September 2020. They cap liability at £1,300 per tonne of the gross weight lost or damaged and exclude consequential loss — but only where the conditions are incorporated at the point the rate is discussed. The RHA is the hauliers' trade association; it writes these conditions for its members and sells them the membership.
- The owner-driver answering hands-free at 56mph cannot write down a postcode — and may not legally touch the phone to try.
- UK Government, The Road Vehicles (Construction and Use) (Amendment) (No. 2) Regulations 2022, 2022-03. Again not a survey — the amending regulations, in force from March 2022. They extended the handheld mobile offence to all use while driving, stationary in traffic included, carrying six penalty points and a £200 fixed penalty.
Questions
What logistics & dispatch owners ask first
Half the calls I get aren't even customers. And no two jobs are the same — somebody tells your robot it's 'just a few boxes', I turn up with a Transit, and it's my name on the side of the van.
The pricing part is true and the agent should not argue with it. It is also not what he is losing. What he is losing is 16:40 on a Friday, when he is on the other line to a driver and three people ring inside ten minutes because their own cut-off has just bitten. It does not decide the vehicle — it writes down the four things that decide it: pieces, weight, dimensions, and what is taking it off at each end. When the far end is unknown it writes unknown, which is already more than a hands-free call at 56mph on the M6 ever gave him. Then he has a complete enquiry sitting there at 17:05 instead of a missed call, and the man who says yes to the job is still him.
Can it price a job? Because no two of mine are the same.
It can read a band off your own rate card and say out loud that it is indicative and subject to your conditions of carriage — or it can quote nothing at all, if you would rather do every figure yourself. What it never does is put a firm price on a house move, an international movement, anything hazardous, anything high-value, or any job where the access at either end is unknown. On a US interstate household move it cannot give a figure at all, and that is not our caution: the FMCSA's household goods rules require an estimate based on a physical survey of the goods, and say in terms that a rate quote is not an estimate.
Half my calls are my own drivers. What happens to them?
They are the first thing it checks. The number comes in, it is matched against the contacts you saved, and a driver is put through before he is asked a single question — no menu, no hold, no qualifying. That is the call that currently loses you a booking, because the customer trying to book four hundred pounds of work is queueing behind the man at the gate at Jaguar who cannot get in. The honest limit is that it matches numbers, not voices: a driver ringing off a gatehouse landline is a stranger to it, and gets the same opening question as everybody else. He says he's one of yours, and he goes through on that.
Someone rings asking where their consignment is. What does it tell them?
Less than they want, and this is the part owners argue with, so here it is flat: there is no tracking feed behind this. It cannot see a vehicle on a map, there is no courier integration, and we are not going to pretend there is a link it can read out. What it can do is look for a job booked under the number she is ringing from — and the person sat waiting in is usually the consignee, who booked nothing and whose number is on no job, so that comes back empty. She is not entitled by default to the address, the driver, the contents or who signed the POD either; that is a disclosure under UK GDPR, not a courtesy. So she gets what can honestly be given: her name and number taken, what she is describing written down, and traffic told while she is still on the line.
He's offering another hundred to squeeze it in. Does it take the money?
No, and it could not act on it if it did. It doesn't negotiate a rate, agree credit terms, waive waiting time or accept a payment arrangement. And the thing that decides that job was never the hundred pounds: it is what is left on a driver's card. Drivers' hours limits and break rules are set in law, they differ by vehicle weight and by whether the vehicle runs on a tacho, and we are not going to print the numbers on a marketing page — you know yours and a page that got them slightly wrong would be worse than useless. What matters here is simply this: a collection that only works if a driver runs over is not available at any price, and the only person who can see how close he is to the limit is you.
Start
Put it on your logistics & dispatch line
Fourteen days free, no card. Point your calls at it when you are ready, and take them back the moment you are not.
It answers on the first ring and tells the caller it is an assistant.
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