Is swift a good company?

The big thing I have been having with mac9 turn down/time adjustments lately is they are requiring the 'Reason' field to be filled out as well. When it first came out I used to just leave the field blank then they would automatically sent 2 messages "must submit a reason..." etc. So I started just putting an "X" in the field then graduated to a "." period to prevent the auto 'must send....' messages.

But here lately I get a DM or planner spending the time to dress me down for not putting a reason on the turn down. I learned a long time ago they accept very few 'reasons' for load refusals and would rather spend time arguing back to the owner operator why he should take the load because the reason wasn't good enough to the planner or DM. Well, I'd rather have the planner looking for the next load than worrying why I turned down their load that is going straight up a mountain into the heart of a hurricane so I can deliver to the ice storm on the other side (exaggeration) but you get my point.

Some of the loads say "$300 fine to the driver if early $500 fine to the driver if late", OK those are automatically turned down but I don't want to tell the planner that is why, he might remove those comments from the future loads and burn some driver, maybe me next time.

I saw one that said if the shipper catches you going over 5 miles per hour on the property they will call the CSR and get you a service failure. OK right away I am not going to service this customer if he has an attitude before I have even accepted their load. But again I don't put a reason down because they (planner and/or DM) want to argue with me that that is a poor reason to turn down their load. I've had them use tears, guilt, and intimidation to get me to cover customers like this. I have heard of another company that is 'no forced dispatch' for owner ops going to a new system where the O/O is allowed to only refuse 2 loads a day then goes to the very bottom of the load que.

The biggest thing I do like about Swift as a company is if my truck breaks down they will front the cost to get it back up and running safe and legal and I square up with them with my maintenance account and future settlements if there was not enough money to cover it. If I was too far into the hole they would allow me to make payments on the balance.

 

The other thing I hate is that they will send an offer for a load I actually really like but then remove it before I finish planning it and accepting it but when its a load offer I do not want they will let it sit for hours. I know one day a planner kept removing and sending the offer again and then sent a "special planner message" telling me to commit to the load, I still turned it down and just said I was going to the shop (which was true)

 

I hate that too, i'll get a plan like that. For example having 3 short hauls in a day Sumner - Portland D&H Back up to Sumner D&H and head back down to Portland for final. Then they remove one of them so I have 150 miles for the day then expect me to take a 10 right afterwards, after that I just refuse to take the load at all.

And those "planner specials" can really screw you over.

 

Ahh yes the evil plus 1. Before it my dm hardly every heard from me on the phone. Now I call atlest 2 a week asking what's the real time. Its a shame because if plus 1 thinks that I am going to deliver that drop at 0001 in the morning it can kiss my fat arse.. I'll deliver it at 0500 to 0800.

 

I had a few loads removed with my training DM after I first went solo. I asked my DM and she said that often load offers are broadcast to multiple drivers, so the first driver to accept will get the load. I then pointed out that this creates a competitive environment that asks us not to do proper preplanning. She didn't have a good answer for that. I told her that I would continue doing preplanning before responding and if loads were removed then I could live with that.

"Planner's Special" - aka "Save Our Behinds, We Really Screwed Up On This One" - seems every time I am offered a PS it means the load has problems. Either it's late, the customer is a hard case, you are being routed to an area that will have no loads coming out, or you are dropping a trailer but there isn't an empty within 100 miles and they can't figure out where it is exactly.

 

yeah I hate looking as soon as I see a planner special message lol

I also dont agree about fighting for a load like you mentioned, I always plan first to make sure I can do it safe and on time etc. It might be a nice 1k run with 2 days on it but I need to make sure of the weight, if im hauling up mountains, how many hours I have vs how many I need etc etc. The idiot who responds first then ends up being late or having to get repowered since they run out of hours while the ones who could of handled the load perfectly lost the chance.

 

Not to mention a likely, and deserved, service failure.

 

yeah indeed, it would be nice though if they would offer the ones with higher percentage of on time better load offers and also give the extra few minutes to plan.

 

Those details must be too difficult to code into the program.

 

there are a lot of things that must be too "difficult" for them to program in or more likely they just dont bother. I still question a lot of things the computer generates such as routes, fuel stops etc.