Ops Efficiency
What 500 Rate Request Emails Taught Me About the Forwarding Business
Six months ago, I did something unusual.
A freight forwarding company gave me access to their operations inbox for a week. No filters. No summaries. Just raw, unedited chaos.
I read 500 rate request emails.
Here's what I learned.
Lesson 1: Every Email Is a Small Emergency
I expected rate requests to be orderly. Structured. Maybe even formatted consistently.
They're not.
One email says: "Pls quote Mundra-Felixstowe 20GP urgent."
Another says: "Dear Sir/Madam, kindly provide your best rates for the attached shipment specifications (see Excel) for our esteemed client who requires delivery by month-end, also please confirm free days and detention policy."
Same request. Completely different language.
And every single one feels urgent to the sender. Because to them, it is.
Lesson 2: The Real Work Is Translation
The operations team isn't just "looking up rates." They're translating.
They translate vague requests into specific routing. "Middle East" becomes Jebel Ali. "Europe" becomes Rotterdam or Hamburg depending on the customer's history. "ASAP" becomes a realistic transit time based on vessel schedules.
This translation work is invisible. It happens in the heads of experienced freight professionals. And it's what makes a quote actually useful to the customer.
The problem? Translation takes time. And experience. And when your best people leave, that knowledge walks out the door.
Lesson 3: Most Quotes Never Become Shipments
This one stung.
Of the 500 rate requests I tracked, roughly 80 became actual bookings. That's a 16% conversion rate.
Eighty percent of the quoting work produced zero revenue.
Now, some of that is unavoidable. Customers shop around. Prices don't always fit. Shipments get cancelled.
But here's what I noticed: the quotes that won were almost always the quotes that went out fastest. Not the cheapest. The fastest.
Speed signals reliability. When a customer gets a quote in 10 minutes, they think: "These people are on top of things." When a quote takes a day, they've already moved on.
Lesson 4: Email Is Both the Problem and the Opportunity
Everyone complains about email. Too many messages. Too much noise. No structure.
But here's the thing: email isn't going away. Freight runs on email. Customers send requests by email. Carriers send rates by email. It's the universal language of the industry.
The companies that figure out how to make email work for them—not against them—will win.
What We Did With These Lessons
Reading those 500 emails convinced me that the future of freight operations isn't about replacing email. It's about making email intelligent.
So we built AI Email Agents.
They read incoming rate requests—no matter how they're formatted. They understand what the customer is really asking for. They pull the right rates from your rate engine. They generate a quote. And they can send it—or queue it for human review.
The translation that used to live only in your best employee's head? Now it's encoded in an AI that works 24/7.
The speed advantage that wins bookings? Now it's automatic.
Those 500 emails taught me that freight forwarding is fundamentally a communication business. The forwarders who communicate fastest and clearest will own the next decade.
One Last Thing
After that week in the inbox, I asked the operations manager a question: "If you could get back 3 hours a day, what would you do with them?"
She didn't hesitate. "I'd call my customers. I haven't had time to actually talk to them in months."
That's the real cost of manual quoting. It's not just time. It's relationships.
