Carrier Web Sites Evolve To Meet The Needs Of Customers
McLeod Software is known as an enterprise software provider. But like other trucking vendors, the company helps many of its customers with web sites.
Paul Erickson, McLeod's Internet product manager said that McLeod hosts about 50% of its customer applications, customers host about 40% of the sites themselves and 10% of the sites are hosted by third-party services.
"The process of producing something functional or searchable is more complicated and intricate than most think," Erickson said.
"Just to get a site that is compatible with all browsers and downloads quickly takes a lot of time and effort. And, getting the site properly built to be noticed and indexed correctly by search engines, is in itself a fine art. Then, adding interactive life to the site takes the stroke of a programmer.
"We provide fully integrated interactive sites with customer, driver and recruiting tools."
Those driver and recruiting tools are becoming more important all the time, particularly in the truckload sector.
"Carriers have been involved in creating applications for load tracking and things like that. But then, they realize they can get a whole bunch of driver applications over the Internet, more than they ever imagined. So they're shifting their sites to more of a recruiting tool instead of a customer-focus tool. They're advertising on billboards and pointing to web sites where drivers can apply," said Rick Halbrooks, McLeod's vice president, sales and marketing.
Carriers are also discovering that web sites can help meet human resources needs. According to Erickson, some fleets make human resources information available to drivers on the company web site. Drivers can download necessary forms and inquire about settlements.
"Driver access helps the HR staff by eliminating many phone calls, questions and requests for HR paperwork and forms. Some carriers are installing Internet kiosks in HR departments and driver lounges to make these services available to drivers online," he said.
Meanwhile, at least one McLeod customer fleet uses its web site and a web camera to monitor a shipper loading dock, allowing them to see which trailers are backed in and to generally monitor progress. That's something we'll probably see more of, according to McLeod president and CEO, Tom McLeod. McLeod has noticed other web trends as well.
"If I was going to make a prediction about where things are heading, it would be that the web sites will become smarter in that they'll automate some of the communication between web sites," McLeod said.
"In other words, if you're my shipper and you've been coming to my site to view shipment status, in the future you might find that my web site automatically posts that information to your web site. The shipper's web site might automatically retrieve information from multiple carriers so that as a shipper, I don't have to go to five different carrier sites to see where all my shipments are. I'll just go to a central location at my site and see all the current shipment."
