2022 Quest for Quality winners show service prevails through trying times

While I like to consider myself a bit of a modern man, I also find that long-standing traditions—especially those that have stood the test of the past few years—hold an important place in our world now more than ever. A standing tradition means its benefits merit the continuation of investment of time and effort—and often money—over a significant period.

A close colleague recently asked whether we needed to call out how many years a certain editorial or research project has been going on in front of the title of the project—the 10th or 15th, etc. Without batting an eye, I responded “absolutely.” Many of those projects have become baked into the markets we serve over decades and have been used as benchmarks on which a single manager, a company, or an entire market measures its performance against its peers and competitors. They hold benefit and merit continuation.

And out of all of those projects we measure in time, the single, most important for Logistics Management (LM) is our annual Quest for Quality Awards. In fact, this marks the 39th year that the survey has been fielded—a project that continues to be known as the single, most important measure of customer satisfaction and service performance excellence in the logistics and transportation industry.

And as LM readers see more “pale imitations” hitting their inboxes from other media outlets, they know that the Quest for Quality (Q4Q) stands out among all others due to the fact that it’s not a popularity contest or the result of the number of clicks on a ballot. Instead, our annual survey of LM readers is by invitation only, allowing those qualified shippers to vote in the type of services that they use on a regular basis and rank those carriers and providers that they work with every day.

“Nowhere else in the market can you find a more comprehensive measure of service performance based on responses from the logistics professions who work directly with them,” says Brian Beaudette, director of Peerless Research Group (PRG), our internal division that administers the Q4Q. “It’s certainly unique in this market, and has stood the test of time because shippers, carriers and service providers all appreciate its authenticity.”

For 2022, Beaudette and the PRG research team received just shy of 4,000 total responses that yielded 131 winners—providers of transportation and logistics services that have posted the highest scores across our lists of service criteria. The listings of winners start on page 18.

“When you consider operating conditions, the results are impressive,” says long-time LM trucking correspondent John Schulz. “The massive surge in demand and the litany of disruptions caused a domino effect across the U.S. trucking network that eventually hit every mode on some level. Yet, the 2022 Quest for Quality survey shows that the overall logistics sector proved to be extraordinarily resilient, as shippers and carrier partners continued to build better partnerships to withstand future disruptions—it’s a true success story.”

Indeed, nearly every trucking category posted strong weighted average scores this year, while we saw some all-time high numbers in Intermodal, 3PL, and Airfreight Forwarding—a trend our team believes will continue as e-commerce volumes soar and the global supply chain network settles back into a more consistent rhythm.

The entire staff of LM would like to thank the thousands of readers who took the time to respond this year. It’s your time and insight that drives the Quest for Quality and keeps it the purest snapshot of carrier and service provider quality available in the market.