Freight Quote Requests: Email and Phone vs an Online Form

The two channels are not two speeds of the same thing. They differ on one structural point: who is responsible for the completeness of the request. In an email, the sender writes what they remember and the broker discovers what is missing. In a form, the fields are declared in advance and the request cannot be submitted while a price-relevant field is empty.

Everything else follows from that. Round-trips, re-keying, out-of-hours answers, audit trail — they are consequences of who validates the data, not independent advantages. Which is also why a badly designed form is worse than email: it enforces the wrong fields and blocks a request that a human would have understood.

Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers and transport commissionaires, is built for the mixed model: the form is the default intake for repeat accounts, email stays open for everything else, and both end up in one quote pipeline. The wider picture sits in the customer portal resources hub, and the definition of the request itself in the glossary entry for request for quote.

Here is a request as it typically arrives. Every figure that follows is a constructed example with invented tariff values; reproduce it with your own grids.

"Hi, can you price 5 pallets, about 2 tonnes, Rotterdam area to Milan, loading next week? Thanks."

Six price-relevant facts are missing: the collection and delivery postcodes (a zone cannot be resolved from "area"), the pallet footprint, the height, whether the pallets are stackable, whether a tail lift is needed at delivery, and the ready date. Only one of them changes the price by more than a rounding error.

Case A — the pallets do not stack. Floor space = 5 × (1,20 × 0,80) = 4,80 m². Loading metres = 4,80 ÷ 2,40 = 2,00 LDM. At the carrier's conversion of 1 750 kg per LDM, chargeable weight = 3 500 kg, not the 2 000 kg gross. Zone IT-1 bracket 3 000–4 999 kg at 11,40 € per 100 kg → 35 × 11,40 = 399,00 €.

Case B — the pallets stack two high. Five pallets become three ground positions = 2,88 m² → 1,20 LDM → chargeable weight 2 100 kg. Bracket 2 000–2 999 kg at 13,80 € per 100 kg → 21 × 13,80 = 289,80 €. Paying-for check: 3 000 kg at 11,40 € per 100 kg = 342,00 €, which is higher, so 289,80 € stands.

Add a fuel surcharge of 8,5 % and an 18 % margin applied as p/(1−m): case A becomes 399,00 × 1,085 = 432,92 € buy → 432,92 ÷ 0,82 = 527,95 € sell. Case B becomes 289,80 × 1,085 = 314,43 € buy → 383,45 € sell. One checkbox, 144,50 € apart.

The broker who does not ask picks one and is wrong half the time: quote high and lose the load, quote low and absorb the difference. The broker who asks pays a round-trip — one email out, hours of waiting, a reply that answers two of the six questions. The loading meter calculator reproduces the LDM step, and paying-for explains the bracket downgrade check.

A form earns its place only if the required fields are exactly the ones that change the number. Ask for less and you are back to email round-trips; ask for more and the shipper abandons the form. This is the shortest set that prices a standard European road shipment.

Two design rules matter more than the list. First, make stackability a hard yes/no, never a default — it is the single field with the largest silent price impact. Second, keep one free-text box at the end for everything the form cannot model, and read it: that box is where oversize, restricted access and "the customer only receives on Tuesdays" arrive.

Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers, uses the same field set in the broker's own quoting screen and in the customer-facing form, so a request submitted by a shipper needs no re-keying to be priced. A field-by-field discussion of the inputs is in what information you need to quote freight.

This is the cost email imposes after the quote is sent, and it is the one brokerages notice last. A mailbox is a transport layer, not a record.

• No denominator for win rate. You can count the quotes you sent and the ones that booked. You cannot count the requests that arrived, so your "win rate" silently excludes every request you never priced.
• The never-answered bucket is invisible. Requests that were too small, too odd, or arrived at 17:45 on a Friday do not appear anywhere. They are the cheapest volume to recover and nobody knows how many there are.
• Phone requests evaporate. A price given aloud and never written down cannot be re-checked when the invoice is disputed three weeks later.
• Key-person dependency. Requests live in the mailbox of whoever the customer happens to write to. When that person is on holiday, the account is unserved and nobody can see it happening.
• No repricing. When a carrier issues a new tariff or the fuel index moves, you cannot re-run last month's requests against the new grid, because they are not structured data.
• Nothing to attach messages to. Documents, photos of damaged packaging and delivery instructions scatter across threads instead of hanging off one reference.

Structured intake fixes this as a side effect. Each request becomes a record with a timestamp, a customer, a status and a Q-YYYY-NNNN reference; accepted quotes convert into shipments under S-YYYY-NNNN, so the whole chain from request to delivery is one readable trail. Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers and transport commissionaires, keeps the conversation on that record too, so messages sit against the quote rather than in a thread.

The measurement side of this — median, 90th percentile and the never-answered count — is covered in the quote turnaround time benchmark.

Vendors rarely say this, so it is worth stating plainly: a quote request form is a funnel with a fixed shape, and part of a brokerage's business does not have that shape.

Requests a form handles badly

• The first-time shipper. Someone who found you today will not create an account to ask one question. Making them do so costs you the enquiry.
• The tender. Forty origin-destination pairs in a spreadsheet is one email and forty form submissions. Nobody fills in forty forms.
• The shipment nothing models. A 6-metre steel frame, a mixed ADR load, two pallets plus a loose crate — these are described, not selected.
• The negotiation. "You were 40 € over the incumbent, can you look again?" has no field. It has a person.
• The exception in flight. A collection that failed this morning is a phone call, and it should stay one.

What email is genuinely good at

Email is asynchronous, universal, requires no onboarding, carries attachments, and preserves tone. For a broker whose differentiator is responsiveness and judgement rather than price alone, the email thread is the relationship. A brokerage that answers a hard request well by email earns the account that a form would have rejected as incomplete.

The honest framing is therefore not "replace email" but "stop spending expert time on requests that are pure lookups". A 3-pallet Rotterdam–Milan shipment on a lane you have priced two hundred times needs no judgement; the steel frame does. Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers, is designed around that split — covered lanes price themselves, and a lane no grid covers is still accepted as a request instead of being bounced, as described in quoting without a rate grid.

Two channels only become a problem when they become two pipelines. If form requests live in a tool and email requests live in a mailbox, you have two half-records, two win rates and two places to look. The fix is not to close a channel — it is to converge them after intake.

A workable routing rule, stated once and applied by everyone:

• Standard shipment, lane covered by a grid, existing account → the form. Answer arrives instantly, no human time consumed.
• Lane not covered, or shipment the form cannot describe → email or phone, then the broker enters it as a manual quote request in the same tool.
• Tender or multi-lane spreadsheet → email, priced offline, and only the lanes that win become grids.
• New prospect → email first, invitation to the portal after the first booking, never before.

Note the second rule carefully: the broker re-keys the email into the tool. That is deliberate and it is a real cost — roughly the two minutes it takes to fill the eleven fields. It buys the record, the reference and the ability to reprice. Be honest about it when you plan the change, because a team that is told "the tool reads your email" will lose trust the first week.

Cargavo does not parse your inbox. It has no email ingestion, no mailbox connector and no AI request reader. Requests arrive either through the branded customer form or by a broker entering them, and both produce the same quote object. That constraint is why the routing rule above is worth writing down rather than leaving to habit.

Track one number while both channels run: the share of requests arriving through the form. If it stops climbing, either the form is missing a field your customers need or nobody is sending the link. The portal itself is covered in the customer quote portal guide.

Every failed portal rollout has the same cause: the customer was asked to change their habit for the broker's benefit. It only works when the form is visibly better for them — an answer in seconds at 21:00 instead of a reply tomorrow morning.

1. Pick the two or three accounts whose requests are most repetitive and most often on lanes your grids already cover.
2. Rebuild the carrier tariffs those lanes need, and check ten past shipments price correctly before showing anyone.
3. Brand the form with your own name and colours so it reads as your service, not as a third-party tool.
4. Answer their next email request normally, then add one line: the same price is available here, any time, with a link.
5. Give each contact their own login rather than a shared one, so the request history is per person.
6. Leave email fully open and never refuse a request because it came the wrong way.
7. Review after four weeks how many requests came through the form, and ask the accounts that did not use it what stopped them.

Two details decide the outcome. The first is coverage: if the form returns "we'll get back to you" more often than it returns a price, the customer stops using it within a fortnight — so onboard the grids before the customers. The second is trust in the number: a price shown in a portal is a commitment, which is why it must be computed server-side from the stored grid rather than from anything the browser can influence.

Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers and transport commissionaires, applies margins server-side per customer, per grid or per bracket, so the price a shipper sees in the form is your sell price and the buy rate never leaves the broker side. Plans and limits are listed on the pricing page.

What the product actually does with an incoming request:

• Branded intake. The customer submits the eleven fields in a portal carrying the broker's name and colours, in English, French, Spanish or German.
• Instant price when a grid covers the lane. The engine applies taxable weight rules, the bracket, rounding, fuel surcharge and the customer's margin, and returns a sell price. The four supported tariff models are weight_zone, pallet, mpl_bracket and hybrid_weight.
• Gridless request when nothing covers it. The request is accepted anyway, gets a Q-YYYY-NNNN reference, and is priced manually in the same pipeline instead of bouncing back to the inbox.
• One record onward. An accepted quote converts into a shipment under S-YYYY-NNNN, with contextual messaging on the same record. Amounts carry their currency: EUR, USD, GBP, CHF, CAD, MAD or PLN.

And what it is not, stated plainly because it decides whether this is the right tool for you:

• No email parsing. There is no inbox connector and no AI that reads incoming requests. Email requests are entered by a broker.
• No carrier API or EDI connectivity. Carriers are onboarded by rebuilding their rate sheet from Excel or CSV.
• Not a load board or freight marketplace, and not a tendering platform: it prices your own negotiated tariffs, it does not find capacity.
• Not a fleet or dispatch system, and not accounting software.

Plans are Starter 49 €/month, Growth 149 €/month and Scale 399 €/month, with annual billing worth roughly two months free and a 14-day free trial that requires no credit card. Team size, customer count, monthly quotes and number of rate grids are what differ between plans — not the quoting engine. If you are still deciding whether a form belongs in your workflow at all, the customer portal hub collects the rest of this category.