"How long does it take your team to produce a freight quote? And how much confidence do you have in the rates behind it?"
These were two of the questions we put to freight forwarding professionals during a recent Descartes webinar.
The answers made for interesting discussion.
During the session, attendees took part in a series of live polls covering quote preparation times, the impact of response speed, surcharge accuracy and the way rate information is managed.
While the results reflect the views of a selected group of freight forwarding professionals rather than a formal industry survey, they did highlight some familiar challenges around freight quoting—and raised an interesting question about how much time forwarding teams could get back by simplifying the process.
Nearly every respondent takes more than five minutes to build a quote.
94% of respondents said it takes them more than five minutes to prepare a freight quote.
Half said a typical quote takes between 10 and 20 minutes, while 19% said it takes more than 20 minutes. For a single quotation, that might not sound significant. Across a busy sales or pricing team handling dozens of enquires, it soon adds up.
A typical quote can involve searching carrier portals, checking different rate sources, looking up surcharges and validating the final figures before anything is sent to the customer. The people doing this work often have years of experience and know exactly where to look, but that doesn’t necessarily make the process quick.
And when a customer is waiting for an answer, every extra step matters.
Every minute spent building a quote is a minute your team could be spending on the next opportunity.
How much can speed influence a customer’s decision?
We also asked attendees whether they believed they had ever lost business because a competitor responded faster.
72% said yes.
The remaining respondents said it was probably the case, although it was difficult to know for certain. Nobody selected the option suggesting that speed was irrelevant.
Of course, quoting quickly doesn’t guarantee a win. Price, service, relationships and the overall proposition all have a part to play.
But the responses suggest that waiting too long to respond can have consequences before those other factors even come into play.
For commercial teams, quote turnaround is therefore more than an internal efficiency measure. It’s part of the experience a prospective customer has when approaching a forwarder.
Then there is the question of trust
Getting a quote out quickly is useful, but being confident that the information behind it is right is just as important.
When we asked attendees how confident they were that surcharges were being captured accurately, only 11% said they were very confident.
That leaves the majority with some degree of uncertainty, and there are plenty of reasons why.
Fuel adjustments change. Security charges change. Peak season surcharges come and go. Origin, destination and inland charges all need to be accounted for. When that information is maintained across different sources, keeping everything current can became a job in itself.
The consequences can go beyond a longer quote preparation time. A missed or outdated surcharge can affect the margin on the shipment and create another task for someone further down the line to investigate and correct it.
Margins can slip away one surcharge at a time.
Where are the rates actually kept?
The polling also highlighted how many different places freight forwarders rely on when preparing quotes. Carrier portals, spreadsheets and other disconnected sources all featured in the responses.
That creates a familiar situation: the information exists, but getting everything together takes time. A pricing team might have the carrier rate they need in one place, a surcharge in another and an internal spreadsheet containing additional information. Bringing those pieces together is where much of the work happens.
The questions raised during the webinar reflected the same concern. Attendees wanted to know more about how carrier rates are maintained, how updates can be automated and how pricing information can connect with other parts of the forwarding workflow.
These are practical questions, but they point towards a wider issue: how much time should experience pricing teams really be spending searching for and checking information?
What could two-minute quoting change?
Towards the end of the session, we asked a simple question: if you could find accurate rates in under two minutes, what would have the biggest impact on your business?
The responses centred on two things: quoting more customers and reducing administration to spend more time on customer experience.
That distinction between the two is important. Reducing quote preparation time isn’t simply about making one process more efficient. It can give commercial teams more time to focus on customers and opportunities.
It also raises the possibility of handling more enquires with the same resources, particularly for businesses where pricing teams are already dealing with high volume of requests.
The opportunity is in bringing it all together
The findings from our webinar point to a common theme: freight forwarders need to find rates quickly, but they also need confidence that those rates are accurate, current and complete.
For businesses still working across spreadsheets, carrier portals and multiple sources of pricing information, there may be considerable time tied up in simply finding, checking and bringing rates together.
This is where centralised rate management can make a difference.
With Descartes Global Price Management™, freight forwarders can bring rate information into one place, manage rates and surcharges more efficiently, and give teams faster access to the pricing information they need to build quotes.
The goal is straightforward: less time searching for rates and more time using them to respond to customers.
Want to hear the full conversation?
Watch the webinar on demand to see the polling results, hear the discussion behind them and explore how Descartes Global Price Management can help freight forwarders reduce quote preparation times while maintaining confidence in their rates.
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