The AA - How incompetent can you get?
(Also see AA exceeds own incompetence)
Some organisations seem to specialise in making a mess of anything they touch. It is as if they send their people on courses to learn just how to botch things up.
Exactly how difficult is it too have a web site send out, in pdf format, a copy of an insurance policy you have just bought? Apparently it is just to great a feat for the AA to master !
This all started yesterday when I bought an on-line insurance policy for my moped. I did all the comparethemarket.com things you have to do nowadays and eventually discovered the cheapest insurance with the AA's comparison service. That was simple enough. It just took quite a bit of time off course to go through all the websites, filling exactly the same information in everywhere, waiting for them to find my address, waiting for them to give me a list of possible employments and business sectors ... but I found what I thought is the best quote. So, I retrieved my credit card and purchased the policy.
- Problem number 1: The AA is not able to make the link to the policy work. Not on their website and neither in the email you receive afterwards.
- Problem number 2: The AA's employees will lie to get you off the phone if you ask them something that they don't have the courage to admit their incompetency. Not being able to print the policy off, I called the AA. Off course I had to waste some more time to go through all the little phone menus to end up speaking to someone who had great difficulty finding my policy. I was transferred about three times too, if I remember correctly. I asked if I could get a copy of the policy emailed to me. This off course was an absolutely tremendously difficult exercise to complete so I had to hold while the AA rep went off to find out if this as possible. I was told that they would send it to me and I should receive it in an hour or so. Considering that it has to be sent from London I guess that couldn't be considered a long time. Internet connections in England are slow you know ...
- Problem number 3: Faxes ?? Well, this morning there was still no sign of the email. I guess it must have been hijacked in Tazmania or something. You never know. However, when I called again this morning I was told that they don't have the facilities to send such emails. Email is off course a very modern thing and you couldn't expect a big company such as the AA to implement it over night. (Maybe one night is like a thousand years to the AA, so we still have another few hundred to go before we could expect anything as complex as email within the AA). They said they'll fax it. Since I don't have a fax, I asked that they fax it to the shop I'm buying the moped from. Unless the guys at the moped shop are brain damaged (which I doubt because they seemed to have quite mastered the concepts appropriate to their field of interest), the AA does not seem to be capable of sending a fax. It has now been 5 hours and still no sign of a fax ...
- Problem number 4: The AA can't get a fax through to even two numbers. Now let's assume that there is something wrong with the moped shop's fax. I went on-line and found a free fax to email service. So when I called the AA for the third time I asked that they send the fax to the two numbers, ie the moped shop's fax number and my newly acquired fax to email number. Well, as I said, 5 hours later and I still haven't received anything and neither has the shop.
- Problem number 5: Oh they have an on-line email support form on their web site that you can use. I used that to tell them that they are incompetent, but it will take them 72 hours to respond. So I can't tell you folks what they have come up with yet. If the response is remotely useful or humorous, I'll blog about it ...