Why We Shut Off the Phone, and What Happened Next
Reading this because you are specifying, buying or selling containers? Send the details and a grader answers in writing, usually the same business day.
Grades, prior contents and freight terms are details that drift when spoken and remembered. Since moving to written-only quoting in 2016, our rejection rate under the five-day inspection window has fallen by roughly four fifths.
The decision came out of a single afternoon in the spring of 2016. A customer four hundred miles away was certain we had agreed a food-grade lot. Our yard was certain the conversation had been about Grade A industrial with a syrup history, which is a different thing at a different price. Both parties were honest. Both parties were remembering a phone call three weeks earlier.
We ate the cost, re-shipped, and then spent a week asking a more uncomfortable question: how many of these had we had, and what did they have in common?
What the pattern turned out to be
Nearly every dispute in the preceding two years shared three properties. It involved a detail with a precise meaning — a grade, a prior content, a UN marking, a freight term. The detail had been communicated verbally. And neither party had written it down at the time.
Nothing in that list is about dishonesty. It is about the fact that this trade runs on specifications that sound similar and cost differently. "Food grade" and "clean" are not synonyms. "Grade A" and "like new" are not synonyms. "FOB" and "delivered" are a four-figure difference on a truckload. Spoken aloud and recalled a fortnight later, those distinctions soften.
The change
We disconnected the line. Since then every quote, grade assignment, prior-contents record, test result and freight term has gone out in writing, and we ask customers to send enquiries the same way.
That is the whole policy. There is no clever system behind it.
The first month was bad
We lost somewhere between eight and a dozen regular buyers immediately. The complaint was always the same and always reasonable: they wanted to ask a quick question and get a quick answer, and a form felt like being held at arm's length.
Two things fixed most of that. First, we got faster — same business day for anything in before 3 PM Central, which is quicker than most people get a callback. Second, we started putting more in the first reply than had been asked for: availability, grade photographs, a delivered price and a lead time, rather than an invitation to a further conversation.
What seven years of data shows
| Measure | 2014–2015 | 2021–2022 |
|---|---|---|
| Shipments rejected under the inspection window | 4.1% | 0.8% |
| Disputes escalated past a first reply | roughly 2 a month | roughly 2 a year |
| Median time to first quote | about 2 days | same business day |
| Freight-term disagreements | regular | effectively none |
| Repeat purchase rate, commercial accounts | 58% | 81% |
The rejection rate is the number that convinced us. Dropping from one shipment in twenty-four to one in a hundred and twenty-five is not a customer-service improvement; it is an operational one. Every rejected shipment is two freight legs, a re-grade and a credit.
The costs we still carry
- We lose urgent buyers. Somebody who needs four totes this afternoon will call a competitor, and should.
- Complex specifications take two exchanges rather than one conversation. A fabrication job with an unusual geometry is genuinely slower this way.
- It reads as unfriendly to people who have not worked out why. This is most of our explaining.
- Hiring is harder. We have to say in the advert that there are no phone screens, and some candidates find that strange.
What we would say to anyone considering it
It only works if you are genuinely fast and genuinely thorough in the first reply. Written-only quoting with a two-day turnaround and a one-line answer is simply worse service. Written-only with a same-day turnaround and everything the buyer needed attached is better service that happens to also be auditable.
642 words · published 21 March 2023 by Marguerite Okonkwo, Operations lead at IBC Tote Market LLC. We correct posts rather than quietly deleting them; if something here is wrong, tell us and we will say what changed.