Today we are adopting an official company policy, “We say no to hagglers!”
As defined by the free dictionary, a haggler is someone who bargains over the price of something — but I would augment that definition a bit and define a haggler as someone where it is nearly impossible to have any type of substantive dialogue to further any sort of valuable partnership.
As our company has grown, we have had enough experiences with these types of shippers to build a very good case that these relationships bring nothing but stress and negative energy to the operations and culture of the company.
We believe very strongly that freight is not a commodity and when price is the only talking point (by the way, we have great rates!), it purely lends itself to building an unstable and unhealthy company culture.
So, here are the top 7 reasons to not do business with a freight haggler:
- If any issues arise during the shipment that change shipping rates (e.g. wrong BOL used, reconsigment), the shipper is NEVER in the wrong and will always blame the carrier/broker.
- If you are an account manager for a haggler and you are out of the office, your team member who takes the call and has to engage in a price battle will not be very happy with you.
- When a haggler calls in for a rate, anybody who hears the back and forth of the call, “Are you sure that is your best rate? Are you sure? No, but are you sure?” will have a moment of wasted distraction.
- If you have an invoice issue that comes through for a legitimate charge that was not told to you upfront when quoting, good luck having a conversation about getting compensated for the extra services that were not indicated when quoting initially.
- On the rare chance you have a freight claim, the haggler’s product may wind up costing 10x what it should logically be valued at.
- There are tons of companies/people who see the value of everything a good freight broker can help them with when it comes to saving them money and managing their logistics needs. You need to spend time with these valued partners.
- It takes away focus on getting better each day!