Real-Time Rates, Right in Your Browser | #WithSONAR

Caitlin (0:12)

Good afternoon, my name is Caitlin. I'm on the Customer Success and Onboarding Team here at Sonar, and welcome back to With Sonar. This webinar is designed to help explore tools and use cases to enhance your overall Sonar experience. Last episode, we went over our Intermodal Dashboard and how you can monitor those lane level insights from the Intermodal to Truckload Market in these unprecedented times. This week, I'm going to review our Quick Rates tool, which allows you to view Sonar's real-time rates and market conditions directly in your Chrome browser. Now, once you've downloaded the QuickRate Chrome Extension, it will be a pop out on the side of your browser. As you can see here, I just have a standard Word document, Google Doc, pulled up and I just click the widget and have access to our QuickRate tool.

This allows you to view those real-time rates directly in your browser, and you can actually customize this widget. We've just released this update. If you click the three dots at the top of the tool and go to customization, you can actually choose how you would like this widget displayed to ensure it's the least disruptive to your workflow. So you can choose whether you have the little widget enabled at all or not. If you have it enabled, you can also adjust the size from small, medium, or large. You can also choose if you prefer a circle or a square, and then you can choose your position where it will go on your screen. So you can do custom and drag it around to wherever you think will be best, or you can have one of the default positions that we have here. You can also toggle this to the left or the right of your screen. Again, totally depends what is going to be least disruptive to your workflow.

Now, once you have your preferences selected, you can just close out of this, and then it's as easy as selecting your equipment type from the top here and typing in your origin and destination. So we currently have van, reefer and flatbed lane level rates available. Then you would type in your origin and your destination, click search, and you have real-time data directly in your browser. Now, a quick little tip, if you ever need a back call or if you're just curious about back call conditions for this lane, you can easily click the arrow, press search, and then you have the back call at the click of a button. So just a little time saver, overall ease of use tip there.

Now we can go into the information that we're returning. So this is a little tool, but it packs a lot of punch because we're giving you a lot of great information and a small amount of space. So first we have our sonar guidance, and this is going to tell you how easy to difficult it is to secure capacity for the lane that you've searched. So this is looking at current capacity conditions as well as overall market size, and then we're returning that guidance to you or your team. So you can help make those quick operational decisions when you're pricing or booking those shipments.

Then we have our track spot rates. Now our spot rates are coming directly from brokers, and they are what they're paying to the carrier. So these are going to be direct rates to the truck, and they include that fuel surcharge. Now the great thing about our rates is that they're updated on a daily basis. So you're getting real time pricing insights as rates are moving in the market, not a few days or weeks behind.

Then we have market conditions, and this is going to show you current rejection rates for that outbound market, and how those are trending in the near term. Now, if you're not familiar, rejections are measuring the carrier sentiment on the market and the percentage of rate being rejected. Now these are going to be the leading indicator for spot rates. So as we see those rejections increasing or decreasing, we'll see your rates fall suit. So this really gives you all pieces of the puzzle. Okay, I have my guidance, how I need to react to have what rates are doing, but why are the rates moving the way that they are? That's what the market conditions is helping you identify. So for this market specifically, it is currently a neutral market from a capacity perspective, and it is moving in a loosening direction. So it shouldn't be too difficult to secure capacity of Houston currently, and it's moving in a looser or loosening environment. So it only should get easier. That's telling me I need to work to drive down my rates in the near term or I'm potentially leaving money on the table.