Your brain is buzzing with everything you have to do. The busywork alone — low-value, repetitive tasks such as copying and pasting load details into a TMS and typing the same status emails over and over again — slows you down and eats into your margins. You’re a top producer in your freight brokerage, not some B-team player. You can’t get weighed down with busywork that results in bottlenecks and backlogs — and lost opportunities.
The Killer Bs
A blog from Teach Me Brokering titled “A Day in the Life of a Freight Broker” is accompanied by a photo of a smiling young woman. She appears to be having a good day. “A day in the life of a freight broker can be both fast-paced and varied, packed with communication, negotiation, and problem-solving,” it says.
While the blog does say it can be difficult for freight brokers to maintain a healthy work-life balance because of the “job’s high stakes and busy nature,” it’s a mostly sunny take on the industry, with moments to “recharge” even built into the workday. Nowhere are the dreaded Bs mentioned.
Granted, some Bs are good: B12 vitamins, the B-52s, a B-plus on an essay about dystopian literature, Cardi B. Then there are the killer Bs: busywork, bottlenecks, and backlogs, which can wreak all sorts of havoc, from lost revenue to broker burnout to horrible customer experiences.
Busywork
Manual data entry, repetitive follow-ups, status checks — boring, busywork kills momentum. The busywork tax on freight brokerages — including the hours lost to data entry and toggling between disparate freight management systems — also can kill business.
In a tight-margin industry, efficiency is king. Leading freight brokers are embracing AI-driven workflow automation to eliminate the busywork and free their teams for high-value activities. For example, Drumkit’s AI-powered freight broker software can read and classify incoming emails, then populate shipment details directly into any TMS, eliminating manual data entry and speeding up processes.
Bottlenecks
In his sappy “Time in a Bottle,” Jim Croce sang: “If I could save time in a bottle, the first thing that I’d like to do, is to save every day ’til eternity passes away, just to spend them with you.”
Nonsense. Spend time together in retirement. Today, the last thing you want is for time to be stuck anywhere. The painful wait for carrier responses and drawn-out, fragmented communication, for example, can result in freight movement bottlenecks, which kill all the progress you made with quick rate quotes. Drumkit’s AI-powered tools flag possible delays and suggest proactive actions, thus avoiding those bottlenecks.
Backlogs
Missed updates and a pileup of unprioritized tasks just kill your mood. Playing catch-up is not what you had in mind for today. Intelligent prioritization made possible with Drumkit’s AI-powered freight broker software keeps tasks moving and prevents backlogs — and the domino effect of one delay after another.
Streamlining Freight Broker Workflows
Traditional freight broker tools fail with:
- Legacy systems: Lack of automation and siloed data hinder workflows.
- Human limitations: Even the best teams can’t scale without intelligent support.
- Reactive workflows: Without automation, freight brokers spend more time chasing problems than solving them.
Drumkit acts as an integrated command center right inside a broker’s inbox, automating all those tedious steps. Our smart features include an intelligent email sidebar that automatically fills in load information for any TMS, one-click load building, and smart email replies.
With Drumkit, freight brokers can streamline their daily workflows, automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks, reducing errors, and enabling teams to handle more loads.
Among Drumkit’s key features are:
- Smart task automation (e.g., instant status updates and document generation).
- Predictive load matching and carrier recommendations.
- Real-time visibility and alerts.
- AI-powered email and CRM integration.
Bs Gone With Drumkit
With Drumkit, AI handles the busywork. Freight brokers can automate everything from rate quotes and load management to real-time tracking and customer communication. These automated workflows dramatically reduce manual tasks. On top of that, AI flags possible delays and suggests proactive actions, thus avoiding bottlenecks. Intelligent prioritization made possible with AI then keeps tasks moving and prevents backlogs.
With Drumkit, freight brokers don’t just survive the daily chaos — they master it, and they move with customers and carriers in perfect symmetry. Book an introductory call with Drumkit and learn the right moves.
