How to automate driver check calls without a driver app

The check call is the most expensive way to learn a fact that a phone already knows. A driver’s phone knows where it is; the dispatcher’s job is to get the driver to share it, three times a day, for every load on the board, without either of them hating the process. The ladder below is how brokerages do that without asking anyone to install anything.

Rung one: the text with a link

On the schedule the broker sets (the morning of pickup, once or twice in transit, once before delivery), the driver gets a short text: who it is for, which load, and a link. The link opens a plain page with one big button. Tapping it asks the phone for location once, the way any website can, and shows the driver a couple of status chips (loaded, running late, problem) and a note box. Done in ten seconds, no app, no account, nothing running afterwards.

The broker gets a place, a time, a stage, and, from those, an ETA to the next stop compared with the appointment window. That comparison, not the map, is the deliverable.

What it takes: a texting number registered for business use (in the US, a 10DLC-registered number, which involves a one-time carrier registration of the company and its message types), the carrier’s consent to be texted, and texts that identify the sender and say how to stop. Nothing between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. in the driver’s time zone; a hard cap per load per day.

Rung two: the call

No tap in thirty minutes means the text was not read or was ignored. Now a short automated call, from the same number that texted so it is not a stranger, asks four questions: where are you, are you loaded, what time will you be at the receiver, anything the broker should know. The answers are transcribed and extracted into the same place, stage and ETA. The call ends in under a minute. Voicemail is not left; a no-answer gets one retry twenty minutes later.

What it takes: the same consent, extended to automated and artificial-voice calls (US law treats AI-generated voices as artificial, so the consent has to cover them), a limit of a couple of automated calls per load per day, and a script that stops the moment the driver says to stop calling.

Rung three: a person, once

Text unanswered, call unanswered, retry unanswered: the load goes on the exception list as unreachable, with the last known place, the last event time, and what was tried. One dispatcher makes one call, or calls the carrier’s dispatch instead, and either resolves it or marks it handled. The system does not keep nagging; the next rung is a human, and humans get told once.

What ops actually sees

Not a map with fifty dots. A list: the loads that need someone this morning, with the reason (unreachable, late, at risk, problem reported, gone quiet), the last known place and time, and what the system already tried. Everything else is folded away as on track. A 7 a.m. digest with the same list means the day starts with the three loads that matter instead of a hundred check calls.

The numbers to expect

Set targets and measure them. A reasonable bar for a normal day: more than half of texts answered within thirty minutes, more than half of calls answered, and fewer than one load in six needing a human. Below those, the ladder still works, it just degrades into a better-organized manual list. Above them, a dispatcher who used to watch forty loads can watch a hundred.

Where LogiPilot fits

This ladder is what LogiPilot Ping does: the text, the link, the call, the exception list and the digest, with consent recorded per carrier and the carrier rules built in. Anyone can try the text and the call on their own phone without an account.