Dock appointment scheduling

Dock appointments,booked by phone, automatically.

Half of the facilities you deliver to still book by phone, and somebody on your team spends their morning on hold to get a dock time. The agent makes those calls, gets the appointment, and puts it on the load.

Calls the facility Waits on hold so you do not Writes the appointment
Live call
Answered in 1 ring ยท 0:00
Live
Hi, calling to schedule a delivery appointment. PO 55218, arriving tomorrow, 42,000 pounds of dry goods.
Let me look. I have got 6am or 1:30 tomorrow.
We will take the 6am. Do you require a lumper, and where should the driver check in?
Lumper is required, check in at the guard shack on the east side.
Written to the load
StopDelivery, PO 55218AppointmentTomorrow 6:00 AMLumperRequired โœ“Check-inEast guard shack

What it handles

First-available requestsReschedulesAppointment confirmationsDock hours and restrictionsLumper requirementsCheck-in proceduresReference numbersFacility contacts
24/7
Calls the moment a facility line opens
Hold
It waits on hold, your team does not
Live
Appointment written to the stop
EN / ES
English and Spanish, natively

Scheduling a dock time should not take forty minutes.

Appointment scheduling is the most tedious job in the building. You call, you hold, you get a receiving clerk who wants a PO number and a weight, you get given two options that do not work, and you call back tomorrow. It has to happen for every load, it cannot be skipped, and the details that come out of it, lumper requirements, check-in procedures, gate hours, are exactly the ones that cause a service failure when they go unrecorded.

What it handles

The call nobody on your team wants to make

Places the call and waits on hold

It has infinite patience with hold music, which is the single biggest reason this job never gets done on time.

Books the first workable time

It knows the pickup time, the transit, and the driver's hours, so it does not accept a slot the truck cannot make.

Captures the fine print

Lumper requirements, check-in location, gate hours, and reference numbers all get recorded, not just the time.

Reschedules when plans change

When a pickup runs late, it calls back and moves the appointment before the truck shows up to a closed door.

Confirms the day before

A short confirmation call the day before catches the appointments a facility quietly moved without telling anyone.

Escalates a hard no

When a facility will not give a workable time, your rep gets the call with everything already tried.

Into the stop record

The appointment lands on the load, not in an inbox

The details that come out of a scheduling call are worthless if they live in someone's notes. The agent writes the appointment straight to the stop through your TMS API, along with the lumper requirement and the check-in instructions, so the driver gets the right information and your billing team knows an accessorial is coming.

  • Sets the appointment time on the stop where your TMS supports it
  • Records lumper requirements, check-in procedure, and facility contacts
  • Notifies the driver and the rep with the confirmed details
  • Triggers a reschedule automatically when the plan changes upstream
  • Keeps a recording of what the facility actually agreed to

What we set up with you

Which customers and facilities are in scope
The information the agent must give and must never give
How it chooses between offered slots
When it escalates instead of accepting a bad time
Whether it runs confirmation calls the day before

Have a facility with unusual requirements?

How it works

Start with the worst facilities

01

Pick the pain

Usually the three facilities your team dreads calling. Those are the fastest wins.

02

Encode their process

What they ask for, what they need, and what has burned you there before.

03

Run it live

The calls go out, the appointments come back, and you listen to the recordings.

04

Expand the list

Add facilities until the only calls your team makes are the ones that genuinely need a relationship.

Questions about appointment scheduling

Usually, because the agent gives them exactly what they ask for, in order, without fumbling. Clerks care about getting the PO number, the weight, and the carrier name quickly. What they hate is a caller who does not have the information ready, and that is not a problem the agent has.

Then this is the wrong tool for that facility and we will say so. Portals should be automated through the portal. The phone agent is for the large number of facilities that still only book by phone, which is where the manual hours actually go.

Yes, and that is a real feature rather than a joke. Hold time is the reason this task gets pushed to the afternoon and then to tomorrow. It also runs multiple calls at once, so ten facilities can be in progress simultaneously.

By rules you set, using the pickup time, transit, and driver hours. If the only options offered would put the truck in violation or blow the delivery window, it escalates rather than accepting one.

Yes, and this is often worth more than the appointment itself. Those details are what cause a driver to sit for two hours at the wrong gate, and they almost never make it into the load record when a human takes the call in a hurry.

Yes, and we recommend it. Facilities move appointments quietly. A thirty-second confirmation call the day before catches it while there is still time to react.

Give back the morning spent on hold

Book 15 minutes and name the three facilities your team hates calling. We will show you what the agent does with them.

Part of our voice AI for freight work, alongside AI voice agents for every other kind of business.