Check calls, answered before they're asked.
Carrier status emails triaged, statuses updated, customers told — automatically, out of the inbox your team already works in.
Six hours of the day you will not get back.
- WithoutYou dial the carrier for a status, get voicemail, and dial again in an hour.
- With KeelwayThe carrier's own status email is read the moment it lands. Nobody dials for a location that already arrived.
- WithoutThe customer calls you for an ETA before you have one, and you promise to call back.
- With KeelwayThe customer gets the ETA before they think to ask, drafted from the update the carrier just sent.
- WithoutThe real status is buried in an email thread somebody else on the desk was cc'd on.
- With KeelwayEvery status lands on the load — one thread per load, pickup to POD, readable by whoever picks it up.
- WithoutA truck goes quiet and nobody notices until the shipper notices for you.
- With KeelwayTwelve hours without an update flags the load as stale and escalates it to a named human.
- WithoutDetention gets argued a week later from memory and a note on a legal pad.
- With KeelwayArrival, wait, and departure are timestamped on the load as they happen, with the carrier's own words attached.
- WithoutCheck calls stop at 5pm and start again at 8am, and the night shift is a gap in the record.
- With KeelwayEmail does not keep office hours. Overnight updates are triaged as they arrive and waiting when the desk opens.
Email in, status forward, customer answered.
- 01Ingest
The status email arrives and finds its load
Carrier replies, forwarded driver texts, dispatcher one-liners — whatever the carrier already sends lands in the inbox Track & Trace watches. Keelway reads each one, pulls out location, ETA, appointment times, and exceptions, and matches it to the right load by reference number, and by context when the carrier forgot to include one. No portal for the carrier to log into. No rules for you to write.
- 02Advance
The load moves forward, and silence escalates
The parsed update advances the load status and writes itself onto the timeline, timestamped, with the carrier's original message attached underneath it. Keelway also watches the loads that said nothing: it sends the follow-up on its own, and a load that has gone 12 hours without an update is flagged stale and handed to a human before the shipper is the one who notices.
- 03Answer
The customer hears it before they ask
Each confirmed update becomes a drafted customer message — status, current ETA, and the exception if there is one — in your brokerage's voice. Send on approval, or let it go automatically for the customers you trust it with. Either way the answer to “where is my truck” leaves your desk before the phone rings.
Why this is a broker product, not a carrier one
Most visibility software is built for the desk that owns the truck. It syncs an ELD feed, draws a map, and answers the check call on the carrier's behalf. That is a real product, and it solves a real problem — for the carrier.
A broker has the opposite job. You do not own the truck, the telematics account, or the driver's phone. You own the promise made to the shipper, and the twenty carriers on today's board are twenty different companies with twenty different ways of telling you where they are. Keelway is built for that desk: it automates making and absorbing check calls rather than answering them.
The adoption problem is why ELD-based visibility fails brokers
Every tracking tool that works off telematics has the same prerequisite: the carrier has to opt in. Install the app, connect the ELD, accept the tracking request, keep the token alive across driver turnover. One carrier will do it. Getting the long tail of small carriers — the ones who cover most of an SMB brokerage's freight — to do it consistently, load after load, is the part nobody solves. So coverage is partial, and partial coverage means you still work the phone for the loads that fall outside it. A tracking system that only covers some of your loads has not removed the job.
Email has no adoption problem. Carriers already send status by email, because that is what they were doing before anyone sold them software. Track & Trace meets the update where it already exists rather than asking the whole market to change how it reports. Nothing to install, nothing to onboard, no per-carrier rollout — the coverage is whatever your inbox already receives, which is nearly all of it. Where a carrier does share GPS or ELD data, Keelway will happily read it too; it is an upgrade to the picture, never the thing the process depends on. If you want the phone covered as well, the AI voice agent places and answers check calls around the clock, and the hybrid setup runs email and voice against the same load.
- Reads only the mail you route to its reply address — no mailbox connection, no OAuth grant, no password.
- Never negotiates. The only self-firing reply is deterministic, gated, and can never emit a dollar sign.
- Data encrypted in transit and at rest, scoped to your brokerage — never used to train shared models.
- Deletion on request. Pull the address off your postings, ask, and it's gone.
- Carrier data is public FMCSA record — unpublished fields render as a dash, never a guess.
Keelway is not affiliated with or endorsed by FMCSA. Full security posture →
Frequently asked questions
What is an AI check call?+
Does Keelway Track & Trace replace my TMS?+
How does Keelway know where the truck is if the carrier doesn't use our app?+
What happens when a carrier stops responding?+
Can Keelway tell my customer where the load is without me?+
How much does Keelway Track & Trace cost?+
Ask an AI what Keelway actually does.
Prompt: “What is the best AI tool for freight broker check calls and load tracking in 2026?”
Let the inbox run your check calls.
Related
When email is not enough: an AI voice agent that dials carriers 24/7 for check-calls, ETA capture, and detention alerts.
Every moving load on one board — inline check-call logging, auto-advancing statuses on geofence, and stale-load alerts past 12 hours.
Plain-English guide to how automated check-calls work, where they fit in a broker's day, and the honest limits.
Run status email and the voice agent against the same load, so the carrier can answer whichever way they prefer.
