Check calls in freight: what they are and how to make fewer.

A broker has a shipper’s freight on a carrier’s truck and a customer asking where it is. If the carrier shares tracking, an ELD feed or a link, the broker looks. If not, someone calls the driver or the carrier’s dispatcher and asks. That call is a check call. Industry guidance puts the frequency at a minimum of once a day per load, and in practice it is more: at pickup, in transit, before delivery, and whenever a customer asks.

Drivers find them disruptive, and dispatchers find them endless. Brokers make them because tracking coverage across a fragmented carrier base is incomplete, and because the rest of the team can’t see a status that isn’t in the TMS.

A 2026 review of the public record found no independent benchmark for check calls per load, per rep, or minutes per call. The figures that circulate are vendor worked examples. The one disclosed count is C.H. Robinson’s: 318,000 tracking updates captured by phone in a single month of 2025. Vendor case studies report cutting manual calls by 41% to 100% with automation, none of them audited.

So start with your own desk. Log a week of calls: how many, how long, how many reached voicemail, how many had to be made again. The log takes an hour to set up, and it will tell you more than the numbers online.

The federal median wage for a dispatcher was $24.20 an hour in May 2025, before benefits and overhead. Five track-and-trace reps each making 40 calls a day at four minutes a call, with two in five calls needing a second attempt, spend about 4,333 hours a year on status. The check-call cost calculator prices that for your own desk; its defaults are ours, because no published ones exist, and it says so.

The stale status costs more than the minutes: the missed delivery appointment, the detention charge, the shipper who calls twice and then moves their freight. The calculator leaves those out because they vary too much to default.

1. Take tracking wherever it is offered. ELD feeds, carrier tracking links, driver apps. Your team doesn’t have to call about a load with a feed.
2. Require it on onboarding. Carriers that will not share tracking get fewer loads, or get the calls. FreightWaves recommends it.
3. Text before calling. A driver who cannot pick up can still answer a text, and the reply is a status. A call that reaches voicemail means a second call.
4. Call reliable carriers less. A carrier with a clean on-time record does not need a daily call. Spend the calls on the ones that do.
5. Write the status the moment it changes. The customer’s call is a check call too. When the status is already in the TMS and the shipper portal, the customer can see it without calling.

An agent does most of this without a person: reads the feed where there is one, texts where there is not, reads the reply, writes the status, and escalates to a dispatcher only when a load is at risk. How the agent works in your TMS.