Freight Quote Turnaround Time: From Hours to Seconds, Step by Step

Quote turnaround time — also called time-to-quote or response time — is one number with a strict definition: t1 minus t0, where t0 is the moment the request reached you (email received, phone call taken, portal form submitted) and t1 is the moment a price left. Two rules make the number honest:

• Wall clock, not business hours. A customer who asked at 17:50 and got an answer at 09:10 the next morning waited 15 hours 20 minutes, not 20 minutes. They compared you against whoever answered that evening.
• A price, not a reply. "Thanks, we’re looking into it" does not stop the clock. Neither does a price that arrives with a clarification question attached, because the customer still cannot decide.

Turnaround is not the same as your quote-to-book delay, which starts after the price is sent and depends on the customer. Keep the two apart: turnaround is entirely under your control, quote-to-book is not. Nor is it your first-response time, which many teams report instead because it flatters the number — a fast acknowledgement followed by a slow price is still a slow quote.

Turnaround also behaves differently by request type. A lane covered by an existing carrier tariff is a lookup; a lane no grid covers is a negotiation, and mixing the two into one average produces a figure that describes neither.

Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers and transport commissionaires, timestamps every request and every quote reference (Q-YYYY-NNNN), so both figures are readable from the quote list instead of being reconstructed from an inbox. The starting point for the rest of this guide is the category hub on freight quote automation, which covers the wider workflow; here we only take apart the clock.

You cannot improve a number you have never measured, and most brokerages quote a turnaround figure from memory that is closer to their best case than their median. A two-week measurement costs about ten minutes a day and settles the argument.

Log every incoming request in a single sheet with these fields:

• Arrival timestamp (t0) — from the email header or the portal record, not from when someone noticed it.
• Priced-answer timestamp (t1) — when the price was actually sent.
• Channel — email, phone, WhatsApp, portal. Phone requests often look fast because they are answered aloud, then never written down.
• Grid coverage — did an existing carrier tariff cover this lane and this shipment profile, yes or no?
• Clarification round-trips — how many times you had to go back for missing dimensions, stackability or delivery constraints.
• Outcome — won, lost, or never answered.

Then read the sample three ways. The median tells you the normal experience. The 90th percentile tells you what a customer occasionally suffers, and it is the number that loses accounts. The never-answered count is the one nobody tracks: requests that were too small, too odd or too late in the day to be worth an hour of spreadsheet work. Those are lost loads that never appear in a win-rate calculation because they never became quotes.

Split the median by grid coverage before drawing conclusions. Covered lanes and off-grid lanes are two different processes with two different achievable targets, and averaging them hides both. The guide to quoting without a rate grid deals with the second case.

Rather than quote a market statistic, count the tasks. Here is a fully worked example — construct your own with your real tariffs and time yourself; the point is the shape of the total, not our figures.

The shipment: 3 EUR pallets of 1,20 × 0,80 m, non-stackable, 380 kg total, Lyon to Barcelona.

1. Reading the request and spotting what is missing — 4 minutes. The email says "3 pallets, around 380 kg". It does not say whether they stack, which changes the price completely.
2. Opening the right carrier file and the right tab, checking the validity date — 3 minutes.
3. Computing the chargeable weight — 5 minutes. Floor space = 3 × (1,20 × 0,80) = 2,88 m²; loading metres = 2,88 ÷ 2,40 = 1,20 LDM; at the tariff’s conversion of 1 750 kg per LDM, chargeable weight = 1,20 × 1 750 = 2 100 kg — not 380 kg.
4. Reading the bracket and running the paying-for check — 4 minutes. Zone ES-2, bracket 2 000–2 999 kg at 14,20 € per 100 kg → 21 × 14,20 = 298,20 €. Next bracket up: 3 000 kg × 11,90 € per 100 kg = 357,00 €, so no downgrade applies and 298,20 € stands.
5. Applying fuel surcharge and margin — 3 minutes. Fuel surcharge 9,5 % → 298,20 × 1,095 = 326,53 € buy. Margin 18 % on the sell price, p/(1−m) → 326,53 ÷ 0,82 = 398,21 € sell, of which 71,68 € is margin.
6. Writing and sending the email — 3 minutes.

Total: 22 minutes of touch time — for one carrier. Comparing a second carrier repeats steps 2 to 5, about 15 minutes more. This is exactly why manual brokerages check one or two tariffs and stop: the cost of comparison is linear in the number of carriers. Definitions of the terms used here sit in the glossary entries for chargeable weight and paying-for, and the chargeable weight calculator reproduces step 3.

The same six tasks, on the manual path and on the automated path. Times are the constructed example above; substitute your own once you have measured them.

Two things matter more than the totals. First, the automated column is flat in the number of carriers: Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers and transport commissionaires, evaluates every configured rate grid — weight_zone, pallet, mpl_bracket, hybrid_weight — in the same pass and ranks the results, so comparing 12 tariffs costs what comparing one costs. Second, the surviving 45 seconds is broker time only when the broker enters the shipment; through a branded customer quote portal the shipper enters it themselves and the broker’s share of the work drops to reviewing what was sent. How rate sheets become that engine input is covered in turning rate sheets into instant quotes.

Take a brokerage receiving 12 quote requests a day, priced by one person who works the inbox in two passes, at 11:00 and 16:30. Nothing here is inefficient or unusual — it is how a small desk protects itself from constant interruption.

• A request arriving at 09:05 waits 115 minutes before anyone opens it, then takes 22 minutes: 2 h 17 min customer-visible.
• A request arriving at 16:35 misses the afternoon pass and waits until 11:00 the next day: 18 h 47 min.
• A request arriving Friday at 18:10, answered Monday at 09:00, waited 62 hours 50 minutes — with 22 minutes of actual work inside it.

Read those three lines together and the priority becomes obvious. Cutting the 22 minutes to 45 seconds improves the first case by 16 % and the third case by 0,6 %. Queue time, not touch time, is what your customers actually experience.

Queue time has three causes, and each has a different fix. Batching exists because pricing interrupts other work — automation removes the reason to batch. Single-person dependency exists because the tariff knowledge lives in one head and one spreadsheet — structured grids plus server-side margin rules move that knowledge into configuration, which is the subject of margin-safe freight quoting. Off-hours arrival cannot be fixed by staffing at all; only self-service can answer at 18:10 on a Friday.

This is why "we already reply fast" and "our turnaround is bad" are usually both true in the same brokerage: fast during the pass, hours or days between passes. Measure the 90th percentile and the gap stops being a matter of opinion.

Four levers, in decreasing order of effect on the measured median:

• Remove the queue (largest effect). A self-service quote page answers at any hour with no human in the loop. This is the only lever that touches evening, weekend and holiday requests, which are exactly the ones sitting in your 90th percentile.
• Remove the clarification round-trip. A structured request form that requires dimensions, stackability, ADR and tail-lift needs converts a two-email exchange into one submission. Each avoided round-trip removes hours, not minutes, because the customer answers on their own schedule.
• Remove the calculation. Chargeable weight, brackets, paying-for logic, indexed fuel surcharge and margin all become one server-side pass over your stored grids. Consistency improves as a side effect: the same shipment always returns the same price.
• Remove the comparison penalty. When comparing carriers is free, you stop defaulting to the first tariff you know by heart.

Two honest limits. Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers and transport commissionaires, has no carrier API or EDI connectivity — prices come from the rate grids you rebuilt, not from live carrier systems, so a carrier who has not given you a tariff still cannot be quoted instantly. And an off-grid lane cannot be priced in seconds by anyone; what you can compress there is the acknowledgement and the routing. In Cargavo an uncovered request still enters as a proper quote request with a reference, gets an immediate confirmation to the customer, and is priced manually inside the same pipeline instead of dying in an inbox.

None of these levers requires an implementation project. Plans start at 49 €/month with a 14-day free trial and no credit card — see pricing.

A single company-wide target is meaningless because covered and uncovered lanes are different processes. Set one target per request type and publish it internally.

Three review habits keep the numbers real. Re-measure a 30-request sample once a quarter, because turnaround decays quietly as volume grows. Review the never-answered bucket monthly and ask why each one was skipped — the answer is usually "no grid covered it" or "it arrived after 17:00", both of which are addressable. And check that your p90 is falling, not just your median: a falling median with a flat p90 means you got faster at the easy requests only.

Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers and transport commissionaires, gives you the raw material for this without extra tooling — each quote carries its Q-YYYY-NNNN reference and timestamps, and accepted quotes convert into shipments (S-YYYY-NNNN) so the whole chain is on one record. If your quoting still lives in spreadsheets, the signs you have outgrown spreadsheets is the next thing to read.