Watchdog statement

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08 September 2011 at 21:01

As a company that prides itself on the service we provide to our members when they need our help, we take these cases extremely seriously. We are constantly trying to improve our service, and feedback from our members is invaluable to us in that process.

However, we fully accept that in these four cases the service our members received was not in line with our usual high standards and we need to take learning from this and improve what we do going forward.  I have personally written to each of these customers to offer our sincerest apologies.

The four concerns highlighted have occurred within the last 6 months during which time we have received over 1.7 million breakdown calls and our patrols have helped over 1 million customers. Our average time to attend during this period is just under 48 minutes and the number of upheld complaints equates to 0.27% of the customers we have attended.

Miss Freeman’s experience clearly fell short of what our members should expect when calling for help from RAC. On this occasion our Patrol should only have offered to tow Miss Freeman as part of a pay-on-use service. However, having made the mistake of upgrading her cover while broken down, we should have honoured the recovery commitment and we are very sorry that Miss Freeman was left to make her own arrangements. Our policy of not offering roadside upgrades has not changed.

Mrs Bentley clearly received inaccurate advice that was not in line with our normal strict guidance and procedures. Ensuring our members always comply with legislation is of paramount importance to us and our technicians receive a high level of training to avoid such incidents – this mistake has been addressed with the individual and communicated to all our technicians.

Since the incident involving Mr Asher in February 2011, we have changed the way we help members who have broken down on a motorway. We will now attend first and validate the membership once we know they are safe. 

Regarding Mr Gilbert’s complaint, we are sorry that he suffered such delays. We work constantly to ensure we answer calls from our members promptly and that they are regularly updated and attended as quickly as possible with the correct resource, first time.  In this case, although our established deployment procedure was followed this did not result in the right resource being dispatched to Mr Gilbert. We will be reviewing the process to see what improvements can be made.

In all of these cases we have clearly let our members down, for which we sincerely apologise. Since these concerns have been brought to our attention we have acted promptly to understand the reasons for each complaint, and are using the lessons learnt to avoid these mistakes happening in the future. 

Neil Thompson

Operations Director – RAC