A rate request lands in Asavinter's inbox. Fifty-four seconds later the customer is quoted a price, with its guaranteed transit time. Before, that request waited for an operator to free up, sometimes the next morning, and by then another forwarder had already won the load.
Asavinter arranges road freight across Europe through a network of vetted subcontractors. Two Guided agents now take the first pass: one prices incoming rate requests, the other finds the truck.
The context
A late reply is a lost opportunity
Every load starts with an email: What price can Asavinter run this lane for? Shippers send this email to four or five forwarders at once, so a good price only counts if it hits their inbox fast enough. To win loads, operators have to move fast just as much as they have to quote well.
Operations have to put in real work to craft a personalised quote for each email:
- read an email whose format changes with every customer
- work out the constraints and requirements: type of goods, loading metres, weight and so on
- price it against distance, vehicle type, area and urgency
- write a clear response in the company’s format and brand
Given the volumes involved, operators can lose hours per day writing responses. Someone also had to watch the inbox all day, because a request spotted an hour late is a request another forwarder has already answered.
Finding the right carrier
Once the customer confirms the order, a broker has to find a subcontractor who will run the lane at the right price. Brokers can find carriers in many places, from their own TMS data on who has done which lane to the carriers who view the ads for a given load.
What Guided does
Fifty-four seconds from email to quote
Every time the customer sends a rate request, the agent:
- Reads the email
- Extracts the origin, destination, the number and format of pallets
- Identifies any particular requirements
- Queries Asavinter's pricing API to get a real price
- Writes an email in Asavinter’s style and branding
- Makes a decision to either reply directly or escalate to a human for review
It prices all three services, groupage, full load and express, and returns them with their guaranteed transit times, so the customer gets every option. Everything that moves the price is taken into account by the assistant, for example: tail lift at collection or delivery, delivery by appointment, ADR constraints.
It also knows the type of loads Asavinter cannot carry. When a request can't be priced, because information is missing or a constraint isn't covered, the agent passes the file back internally for a person to take over.
The reply is sent as a structured quote email, in Asavinter's own format and signature, with the original request attached.
Median turnaround: 54 seconds from request to priced quote in the customer's inbox.
More than 6,500 rate requests handled in production since go-live.
Identifying the carrier
For confirmed loads, Guided posts the offer to the freight exchanges and collects candidates from three places: carriers that have run the lane for Asavinter before, carriers who open the advert, and carriers searching that lane right now.
The agent sorts through 50 signals to prioritise the best carriers, including lane history, vehicle type, ADR constraints, urgency and each carrier's response rate. From this ranking, the agent calculates a probability of a positive reply within 24 hours, only contacting candidates above a threshold.
The model is 15 times better at picking out the carriers likely to reply than untargeted outreach.
The agent then comes back with the available carriers and their prices, and the broker decides who gets the load.
More than 4,600 carrier sourced for Asavinter’s loads
Live in days, no development necessary
Asavinter's first agent was answering rate requests within days of the kick-off, and the company has since handed both agents to every one of its brokerage teams.
No one installed anything. Operators, customers and subcontractors continue working out of their inbox with no change in the way they work.
What Asavinter says
"Working with Guided has been genuinely useful. They've freed up a lot of time for my teams, helped us bring AI into the way we actually work, and made us far more responsive to our customers, which matters a lot in our business."
Steve, Asavinter CEO
