Building a network of trusted carriers to prevent freight fraud
Role
Sole product designer for research, testing and design
Duration
~1 month from brief to full product launch
Collaboration
Crossfunctional: Product, design, engineering, and solutions team
Outcome
80% reduction in onboarding times, as well as freight fraud rates by 10%.
Background
Summary
A little about Rose Rocket
Rose Rocket is a SaaS company looking to re-invent the way the transportation industry thinks about their management software. Unlike traditional transportation management software (TMS) that prescribes a specific way to run a business, Rose Rocket's platform provides organizations of any scale and function unparalleled flexibility with adaptive modules. This allows customers to only buy what they need and customize everything from their workflows to the tools and business rules that run underneath it.
Fraught with fraud: The 2023 freight landscape
With the freight downturn beginning in 2022, increased competition for load tenders meant that freight brokerages across North America reduced risk management in order to be competitive, precisely at a when time fraud tactics were become increasingly more sophisticated thanks to advacements in technology.
The result is a perfect storm that costed the industry an estimated $500-700 million USD in 2023 according to the Transportation Intermediaries Association (TIA), a number unfortunately projected to trend upwards in the years to come.
"We invest so much time each day just making sure these new partners we're working with are who they say are [...] It's like an arms race, we find a new way to verify and within months these bad actors are ahead of us again." - Paul K, KWE Inc. Canada
With fraud hurting the industry, this was a problem we knew we had to solve. Our goal with the Carrier Onboarding feature was to provide a simple but effective way for freight carriers to indentify and verify themselves with brokers, with the eventual goal of creating a wide reaching, self sustaining network of trusted partners across North America.
Understanding current pain points
To kick off the project my PM and I spoke with our account and solutions managers, in-house specialists who have extensive industry knowledge and constant touchpoints with existing Rose Rocket customers (specifically brokerages).
Relying on them as subject matter experts and a proxy to speaking with customers directly, we were able to distill a few key insights as to why verification was currently tedious or frustrating:
Cross referencing is essential
Most verification of new carriers involves vetting emails, addresses, phone numbers and websites
Public does not mean 'valid'
The government registry of carriers is not always reliable due to impersonation risks
Paperwork is exchange is extensive
A lot of documentation needs to be collected before a load is dispatched to a new carrier
What was important to note was that no two brokerages did onboarding the same way - some prefered to onboard before they contract the work, others prefer to do it ad hoc while they're setting up the order, and still others might not care about onboarding a carrier all. This meant that whatever user flow we came up with had to be dynamic enough to accomodate multiple different but all valid ways of working.
Our approach
With so many things we wanted to address, we decided to take a multi-staged approach to this project:
Phase one would be focused on the prequalification step, helping brokers find the right carrier to engage with
Phase two was the next step for when a carrier has been selected, requesting and recieving their information via an onboarding questionnaire.
Phase three involved leveraging AI and various UI improvements to make the first two offerings far more robust and was considered, even in the onset, as a reach goal.
Leveraging the power of platform
The idea of fraud prevention in the freight space is not a novel one, but our approach is unique in that it relied heavily on a few of Rose Rockets' best-in-class features:
Every entry in our system of record (SoR) can be shared publicly, so for a carrier to provide their information it's as simple as being shared a link. All updates are live so turnaround times are just as fast, if not faster, than email.
Flexibility is at the core of the Rose Rocket experience, so our out of the box solution serves the majority while customizations allow us to also cater of the minority.
Automations for custom business logic, like customizations, give businesses the freedom to control notifications and interactions as they see fit
With these fundamentals, we were confident we could build a solution that solves a lot of the problems our customers face while still providing a bespoke experience. More ambitiously, we wanted this solution to be the start of a Rose Rocket ecosystem of trusted brokers and carriers across the US and Canada.
We didnt just want to be an index of carriers local to a customer's SoR, but a verified network of brokers and carriers that anyone on Rose Rocket can access
How we're measuring success
Because this carrier onboarding feature was bundled into an existing tiered plan, tracking the adoption rate of said tier was the foremost indicator of success. Although we had no hard goal as to how much change we expected to see, we also decided to monitor a few other meaningful metrics that proved feature value:
Increased
The one metric we cared above all else: How many carriers were buying into this feature?
Reduced average onboarding time
Since onboarding times can vary based on urgency, we decided to only measure same day onboarding
Reduced freight fraud instances
Since this is highly subjective and contextual, customer outreach would be the only way to validate this
Phase 1: Pre-qualification
To address the issue of brokerages needing multiple data points to verify a carrier, we decided to include publicly available information from the US government's FMCSA database within the existing carrier search feature. With this new UI, a user who once had to tab between multiple pages to make a decision now could see everything without leaving Rose Rocket, greatly reducing cognitive load.
Merging three different style of carrier selection dropdowns into one unified UI with FMCSA datapoints displayed
There was also an opportunity here to clean up a lot of old UI that had been built before we moved to standardized components, so as part of this work we eliminated the difference in visuals across all instances of this partner select dropdown, streamlining development and reducing tech debt in one fell swoop.
Phase 2: Onboarding
Given the prevalence of impersonation using publicly available information, a conscious choice was made to not pre-fill information for the questionnaire sent to carriers. While this slowed down the input of information, we believed it to be a necessary safeguard and forcing function to ensure honesty and accuracy.
Instead, any information from the FMCSA database would be shown only to the broker - once they got information back from the carrier, they can cross reference what they have with what they recieved and address any discrepancies.
Comparison of the same record but with different permissions: Broker (user) on the left, Carrier (external guest) on the right
As mentioned earlier, we generally knew what questions would be asked of a carrier from a vast majority of brokers, but on the off change there was something the broker was dying to ask and we didn't include, we gave them the ability to customize not just the questions, but also the sequence in which they are presented
Phase 3: Advanced verification
While verification can be done manually and already miles smoother experientially than emails or phone calls, we wanted to take it one step further an introduce an AI agent that could validate and summarize everything submitted - all a user would have to do is read an excerpt and approve or reject.
Other improvements we concepted out included improving our address log to not just show the address in text, but simultaneously display a pin in Google maps and street view to further validate an address. Like many of the quality of life upgrades we proposed, this gives users more information without having to divert their attention away too much.
As with any project, we had to make tradeoffs with regards to what was feasible given the timeline and resources we had, so many of the improvements here remain undeveloped.
The final product
Back to the customers
While we were very confident what we committed to developing was in line what the industry wants, we also took time out to speak with some of the partners we didn't have a chance to engage with properly early on. Alongside my product manager, we reached out to 5 brokerages currently on Rose Rocket to give them a sneak peak of the feature we were developing
To say the reception was positive would be a severe understatement:
"Yeah I have a question...how soon can we have this? This would be a real game changer" - Ryan B. LDK Logistics
And that was when we knew beyond a shadow of a doubt, that we had a winning feature on our hands.
The results
Within weeks after release, we saw a number of customers uptier their feature plan to incorporate carrier onboarding into their workflow. Monitoring Datadog session replays indicated a significant decline in onboarding time; Each session averaged roughly ten minutes, which represented a significant drop from the original hour it used to take without carrier onboarding.
Although freight fraud was a harder one to measure, on a unrelated discovery call one day we came across a customer who was actively using carrier onboarding and by their estimate, saw a dip of roughly 10% in freight fraud in their business dealings.
It was extremely rewarding to see how genuinely excited some of our customers were to get their hands on this feature and to see freight fraud tackled, no matter how minute the impact, makes it twice as satisfying. While the adoption rate might be relatively small we are convinced that with more time and momentum, this feature will become a key value proposition of the Rose Rocket platform.
What's Next
Summary
Lessons learned
While carrier onboarding was a success, there is still an entire phase of designs ready and waiting to be developed. As such, both my product manager and I learned valuable lessons on scope - while we delivered the feature on time, we had to make tradeoffs along every step of the journey.
Our approach was fairly unorthodox as well - many would question why our customer calls came at the end and not the beginning. To that end, both my PM and I did a retrospective and diagnosed that the inversion in process was largely due to capacity at the time and jointly committed to making sure we don't take the same risks for our future projects.
Want to learn more?
There's a lot more detail and thought that went into this project than is practical to show in this format. If you'd like to get a full walkthrough, please contact me.
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