No matter whether it’s at work or shopping, or when dealing with phone companies (don’t get me started.), the feeling that you’ve been treated badly in customer service terms is one of the most frustrating things that can happen.
Click on our long-term reports for either our BMW 520d or our Honda Insight and you’ll see they’ve hit trouble that should have been quite easy and pain-free to resolve, but turned out to be the opposite.
Maybe I’m old-fashioned in expecting brake pads to last more than 7000 miles, especially given I know how our BMW 5-series was being driven, but long, early morning and therefore pre-queue cruise-controlled motorway journeys shouldn’t be taking their toll on brakes. So for our long-term 520d to need more than £175 of replacement pads and therefore not-covered-by-warranty-sir work was surprising.
Ditto the AA taking four hours on a cold Wednesday night to respond to a woman stranded on her own with a flat tyre. And to suggest she should wander into the darkness in an area she didn’t know to find a pub to wait in was irresponsible in the extreme.
We’re all aware things go wrong from time to time, like a six-month old car needing a new set of brake pads, or a tyre getting a chunk ripped out of it by a pothole, but it’s the way these problems are dealt with that says a lot about the firms involved. Hopefully, these were isolated incidents – I’d be interested to hear from readers with experiences that can guide me on that point – but rightly or wrongly I’m disappointed by two well-regarded businesses.
Paul Barker
Editor
