Building your Central Dispatch rating, load by load

Your Central Dispatch rating is your credit score in this industry — it decides which loads you see and what they pay. And the single most important fact about it: brokers almost never leave reviews on their own. Satisfied is silent. If your profile is thin, it’s not because you haul badly; it’s because nobody asked.

The system that works

Ask on every load, immediately after POD. The window is short — the load is fresh, the broker is relieved, and your invoice is in their inbox anyway. A week later you’re one of forty carriers they’ve dispatched since.

Make the ask effortless. One or two sentences, with your company name exactly as it appears on Central, sent by the same email thread the load ran on: “Appreciate the business — if everything looked good on our end, a quick rating on Central Dispatch helps us a lot.” No links to chase, no forms.

Earn it with paperwork first. The carriers who get reviews are the ones whose BOLs arrive clean and whose invoices don’t need correcting. A broker who just had a zero-friction load says yes to a three-minute favor; one who chased your paperwork doesn’t.

Track asks like receivables. A simple sheet — load, broker, asked, received — turns reviews from luck into a pipeline. Expect single-digit hit rates without follow-up and much better ones with a single polite nudge.

The compounding effect

Ratings gate the better boards, and better loads leave more margin to be selective with — so the profile that grows keeps growing. It’s also the road out of the boards entirely: a carrier with visible standing starts getting direct calls. This whole discipline is standing procedure in our backoffice — the new-authority program is essentially this system, run for you, on every load you complete.

Keep reading: Why brokers won’t book your new MC