Learn how AFC uses Vooma Cover to screen inbound carrier calls, double loads, and turn load boards into a lead generation engine for repeat carrier capacity.

AFC is a family-owned, asset-based carrier with 150 flatbeds and a growing reefer fleet, plus a freight brokerage arm that gives shippers another option. The company was founded by Steven Malley, who started out driving a truck, then bought a second one and grew the business from there. Today the fleet is headquartered in Gary, IN, and the brokerage runs out of AFC's office in the Channelside district of downtown Tampa.

AFC is a flatbed trucking company first, and that's also where it wants to grow: more flatbed shippers on the brokerage side, and more dedicated freight for the reefer fleet it's actively expanding. Jason Stewart, VP of Logistics, wants AFC to run with the carrier sales capacity and operating discipline of a $500 million company, even though AFC is a fraction of that size. "We wanted to build that infrastructure as we add more trucks," he explained. That build started with Vooma Cover, Vooma's AI voice agent for inbound carrier calls.

Before Vooma Cover, AFC had seven carrier sales reps fielding 80 to 100 inbound calls a day from load board postings. Only 30% of those were qualified, meaning 30 out of every 100 passed AFC's risk assessment and met the pickup window. Of those 30, at most 12 booked. Rate negotiation killed the rest.

Reps were taking 70 dead calls a day and spending 4+ hours on the phone with nothing to show for it. Call volume was so high that all seven reps had to take inbound, which left no time for outbound work, the kind that actually compounds into repeat business.

The growth math backed them into a corner. Every 150 loads of added volume needed another carrier sales rep. At some point, AFC was hiring college-educated people to answer phones for eight hours a day. "It's not an efficient use of their skill set and potential," Jason said.

That took a whole person. It's an eight-hour day, a hundred inbound phone calls. And to know that seventy of them were useless and had no impact on the organization. They were never gonna haul that shipment. They were just calling. - Jason Stewart, VP of Logistics

AFC deployed Vooma Cover to manage every inbound carrier call off the load boards. The voice agent qualifies carriers, shares load details, negotiates within margin targets set in advance by AFC, and disqualifies the roughly 70% that were never going to haul.

That alone gave each rep back about four hours a day. But screening is only the beginning.

AFC turned the load board into a lead generation channel

Every call from the load boards is routed to Vooma Cover, which checks whether the equipment and timing work, runs AFC's risk assessment, and negotiates against AFC's preset margin targets. Carriers who don't qualify still get logged: contact details, MC number, the lane they wanted, and the rate they offered, so nothing gets lost.

Qualified carriers go to a small offshore execution team that closes the booking. That shift freed up the other 60% of AFC's stateside staff to focus on relationships full time: calling every carrier that hauled a load through Vooma, asking about their experience with AFC and how the company can support their network. Screening moved to Vooma, execution moved offshore, and the stateside team moved up to owning the relationship, training, and growth work that used to get squeezed out entirely. The goal of every call is a second load, then eventually a lane.

Offer data builds carrier profiles over time. A carrier who has emailed on 87 similar loads gets a preferred lane list built automatically, without anyone asking what they want to haul. As reuse climbs, AFC needs the load board less. The endgame is to post loads only a day or two before pickup, then shift to Vooma outbound calling against the carrier network AFC has already built.

Before, the team posted loads and waited for the phone to ring. Now outreach goes to carriers AFC has already vetted and watched perform. That deliberate funnel, following up on every carrier who hauls a load, is why carrier reuse moved from 22% to 42% in a single quarter. (See Vooma's piece on the making of a modern carrier sales rep for more on this shift.)

The channel that was hiding in plain sight

AFC receives approximately 1,000 inbound carrier emails daily. Before Vooma, booking a load by email meant a rep had to either take a screenshot of the details or manually retype them into the system. Phone outweighed email roughly 70 to 30. With Vooma's automated email ingestion, the split is now about 50/50, and Jason estimates AFC may now book more over email than phone.

Jason's next goal is a booking that never needs a human at all: a carrier gets a rate confirmation automatically, and the only person involved is on a later verification call. He's aiming to have it live within six months.

Aggregated offer data also replaced AFC's old rate-approval process, a Google chat channel where reps flagged prices one at a time. When a lane that normally gets three or four offers suddenly gets twelve in thirty seconds, AFC reads that as an excess-capacity signal and passes it to sales to win more freight. That kind of real-time market data used to sit in someone's head, or nowhere at all.