Motoring

Motoring Complaints – All Your Available Options

When it comes to making a motoring complaint, you have quite a few different options available to you and it’s important you understand them all.

Motoring Complaints – Your Choices

Alright, so let’s take a look at the thrilling world of motoring complaints, to try and understand exactly what rights and responsibilities you have available to you when it comes to raising a grievance. When you encounter something that you’re not satisfied with, such as a violation of the code of practices, or you have a general issue with a dealer, manufacturer or even a registered mechanic, then you do have the right to try and raise a complaint and resolve the issue for yourself.

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There are quite a few different options available for when you do want to lodge a complaint, which is why we thought we’d go over a few of them here and now with you. Naturally, you have the option to take your complaint directly to the person or company in question which you’re not happy with. Alternatively, when they’ve done all that they can for you and refuse to do any more, you can seek out the services of an ombudsman to help. This is a specialist who will be able to help you figure out the best way forward, but they’re only able to be of use once you’ve exhausted conventional means.

If you’re going to file a complaint directly with the company, then you should go and take a look at their internal policies. Imagine that you’ve bought a new car, fresh off the dealership floor, it looked good and drove well in the lot. Now, the brake isn’t working, there’s a bad smell in the backseat and you’re generally a bit annoyed. Naturally, this sort of thing could lead you to complain, but before you can, you’ll need to look at the complaints policy of the company or person. Nearly every business has a process in place for people who aren’t happy, and they expect it to be followed. It’s when you don’t that things start to go a little bit wrong down the line.

So How Do I Complain?

If you’re someone who has limited experience in making complaints, or you’re someone who just doesn’t feel comfortable doing so at the minute, then you might need a bit of help getting to that point. Not to worry, however, because we’re ready to step in and help you figure out exactly how to raise your grievance by going over a few tips and tricks.

The first thing that you’re going to want to do with a successful complaint is take a lot of photographs. Evidence that your vehicle isn’t working in the way it should or that the code of conduct has been violated is one of the easiest ways to make sure that everything that can support your claim is gathered together in one place.

From there, it’s a lot to do with making sure that you interact with the company themselves in a polite and sensitive fashion. No one likes to be just yelled at. You’ll find that almost instantly, behaviour like that can result in someone being less inclined to help you out and go through the process with you to get things sorted. So you should always make an honest attempt to try and be polite and respectful because this will help you when it comes to getting the resolution you need. You should also try and come prepared with a solution too – this can really help! It’s no secret that customer service reps and in some cases, the dealerships themselves just want to get a problem fixed as quickly as possible because something like this is bad for their reputation. However, what you will find is that you can use this to your advantage and come up with a few different solutions and you’ll probably see one of them get implemented.

Finally, when making complaints which go on for a very long time, you should make sure that you are logging the time, date and the name of the person you’re speaking to. Building up a record of what has been going on is exceptionally useful for bringing a new person up to speed, or even explaining to the ombudsman what’s happened.

Escalating a Complaint

 Obviously, when dealing with car manufacturers or anyone in the motor industry, you do have the option to take a complaint and push it further. You’re under no obligation to accept the solution put forward if you don’t want to, and many people choose to speak to a manager or someone higher up the pecking order.

It’s also quite common for people to take their complaints away from the dealership or entity once it’s been established that no more will be done for them. In this case, people choose to contact a motoring ombudsman, and they’re a crack team of experts who can help to find alternative dispute resolution for people who need it. They can look at your claim and analyse all parts of it to help you to get the best possible solution and compensation when you feel that something isn’t right.

If this is a process that you want to get started with, then you’re going to want to provide them with all the details of the claim, and then all the details of the problem not being resolved. This helps the team to get a clear picture of what’s going on – leave your contact details with them and wait to be informed of how things are going.

Your Options For Motoring Complaints

 So as you can see, you’ve got quite a few different choices available to you when it comes to making motoring complaints. There’s so many options to think about and a whole selection of different choices, which is why you need to be considerate when making a proper complaint. Remember that you have the right to object to something as a customer and that the company does have to take you seriously. Typically, you’ll find that these companies do take an issue to heart because it can be damaging to their reputation if you just keep complaining without any solution to pacify you. However, you should always try and be polite and respectful when it comes to making a complaint because it’s really important to get things resolved in a peaceful and sensible manner. Finally, you should be aware that when it comes to resolving complaints properly, you can take it higher if you need to and to a more legitimate authority such as the ombudsman. But as this is only an available option when all other contingencies have been used up, it would be in your interests to try and make sure you resolve things internally first.