Automated check calls

What the manual version costs

A scheduled check-call routine touches every active load, two or three times a day, whether anything has changed or not. The call takes a few minutes when it connects and longer when it doesn't, because a driver who is driving doesn't answer, and the dispatcher has to come back to it.

Do the arithmetic on your own board. Two hundred active loads, three touches a day, four minutes a touch is forty hours of dispatcher time in a single day, nearly all of it spent confirming that nothing has happened. The expensive part isn't the minutes. It's that every call costs the same whether it tells you something or not, so there is no way to triage them by phone.

The two jobs being automated

"Automated check calls" means two separate things, and tools in this category tend to blur them.

The first is getting position without a phone call. LoadSignal has four paths, and they ask different amounts of the driver. A text with a browser link installs nothing and covers one load. The driver app keeps reporting from a pocket, through locked screens, load after load. A direct connection to the carrier's ELD (Samsara and Motive, in beta) uses the assigned vehicle. A supported carrier share link brings an existing location feed onto the load. Choose the path that fits each carrier.

The second job is deciding which loads need a person, and it is the one that matters. Position on its own just moves the checking from the phone to a screen: somebody still has to look. LoadSignal checks active loads on a five-minute schedule and on relevant load events, using eleven detectors: tracking gone stale, the truck stationary mid-transit, off the planned corridor, an appointment about to slip, a POD missing after delivery, and the rest. What reaches a dispatcher is the load that tripped one, with a recommended action attached, not a screen of dots that are all fine.

What drivers are asked, in detail

When nothing comes back

The failure mode of every tracking tool is silence. A driver who never taps the link, a phone that died in a cab charger, an ELD feed that stopped. A tool that goes quiet when the data does has automated nothing, because now somebody has to check the checker.

So silence is treated as a signal of its own. If no position arrives inside your threshold, the load lands on the board as an exception. If nobody picks that exception up inside your acknowledgment window, it escalates: first to operations, then once, and only once, up a level, so nobody's inbox fills with the same alert. When position comes back, the exception closes itself and the log shows who was told and when.

What stays with your dispatchers

The product chases; the dispatcher decides. Reminders to a driver can go out on their own once you switch that on, and it is off by default. Anything drafted by AI for a customer waits for a person, who can rewrite it or bin it. A draft that sits until the exception behind it resolves expires unsent, so nobody sends yesterday's delay.

What this doesn't do

It can't make a driver share a location. It can flag the missing update against your response timeout and put the follow-up on your team's board.

It works alongside your TMS and doesn't replace carrier settlements. Loads come in from a rate confirmation PDF, a CSV, an integration, or by hand, and the watching happens alongside whatever system stores your freight.

AI-drafted customer updates require approval. Scheduled status emails can run after your team enables them.

Where to start

LoadSignal is in early access, built for brokerages moving roughly a hundred to a couple of thousand loads a month. If you are staffing the function rather than automating a workflow, read track and trace for freight brokers; if you are comparing tools, how the load tracking software category divides. The FAQ covers what drivers are asked, what customers see, and how far the automation goes; the product page shows the board itself. If the check-call schedule is where your dispatchers' day goes, request early access and we'll set your thresholds up with you.