In today’s transportation world, on-time delivery is just the starting point. Customers expect reliability, transparency, and capacity that’s ready when they need it - every time.
At a recent ISO webinar, hosted by John Stauffer (Co-Founder & COO, ISO) and joined by Michael Caney (CCO, Highway), our COO Rob Workman shared how CW Carriers combines technology and data to deliver all three.
Scaling the Right Way - Service First
As our customer base has grown, we’ve stayed committed to service quality over “growth at all costs.”
We faced three big challenges along the way:
- Manual, “brute-force” sourcing - hundreds of calls and trial-and-error carrier vetting.
- Limited visibility into carrier reliability - relying on past experiences instead of comprehensive data.
- Too many one-off carriers - each new relationship requiring time-consuming onboarding.
Our Two-Stage Carrier Vetting Funnel
To solve these challenges, we built a multi-tiered carrier selection process that combines:
- Highway - filtering out high-risk carriers and blocking fraud before it reaches our network.
- Their monitoring blocks over 130,000 fraudulent emails every month.
- It reduces redundancy and strengthens identity verification.
- ISO - adding a performance filter to identify carriers with proven reliability.
- Service data provides context on carrier strengths, weaknesses, and compliance.
- It enables smart trade-offs, like paying slightly more for a trusted partner.
Whether it’s our own asset truck or one of our vetted partners, we know our customers get the same service level.
The Results
Since implementing this approach, we’ve seen measurable improvements:
- 50% higher carrier rep efficiency - 60–80 targeted calls/day instead of 150–200.
- Carrier utilization up to 60% - working with fewer carriers, more often.
- ~5,000 reliable carriers in our active network, with shipments-per-carrier up 35%.
- 10% fewer bad bounces - saving about $170/load in recovery costs.
- Lower fraud and compliance risks - leading to fewer insurance claims.
- Higher customer retention - thanks to real-time, transparent performance reporting.
“We’re focused on building reliability, not just capacity… and the ability to leverage data and tech to demonstrate that is the foundation of relationship building.” - Rob Workman
Why This Matters to Our Customers
For customers, this means:
- Built-in risk prevention.
- Capacity matched to each lane and service requirement.
- Performance transparency from day one.
- Consistent, dependable service no matter what.
Our Takeaway
Technology is a great equalizer. By combining ISO’s service data with Highway’s fraud prevention tools, we’ve created a right-sized, high-performing carrier network that puts customer trust first.
And we’re just getting started.
