So what constitutes five star, superior customer service in the trucking industry? When a satisfied shipper congratulates you on that 'great outcome.' But those great outcomes don't come easy. The pressure to meet each drop-dead deadline is on you, the owner-manager, as the 'truck stops here' blame or praise becomes reality on a daily, weekly, monthly basis.

You determine when the weather's too bad to risk your drivers, your trucks and the shippers' livelihoods. You make the decisions for hiring and firing drivers and office staff, as well as when or whether to expand to more trucks or shipping lanes. You need a lot more help in making those tough calls besides pulling out a coin and flipping it to determine an outcome.

Sometimes one of your drivers has the entire six months' struggle and labor of a start-up factory's workers loaded into his trailer. And at this point, Customer Service doesn't just mean driving carefully and invoicing correctly. It entails a little hand-holding with a nervous dock foreman, a lot of reassurance to the workers and extreme logistics research with the factory manager beforehand. So how do you learn to do all of that - before your truck heads to the dock?

Answers are in the first book in the Small Motor Carriers series, "Customer Service."

Your small motor carrier has a reputation of providing the utmost in customer service to every one of its shippers, whether they're large-volume dry goods, weekly farm produce or the twice-every-three-years welded art sculpture customer.

This newest book from TruckersU will help you build your shipper base, keep customers happy, and take your small carrier to the great success you envision. Here are tips on not just packing and loading, but creating carefully-tailored logistics plans with each of the shippers you've decided to keep.

To your success!