Any truck can break down, at any time. That's one rule of the road no one gets much say in or control over. What happens after the incident can make or break your downtime. Your choice of insurance policies and roadside assistance might either ease you back into the saddle or bury you in paperwork and steep bills -- in the worst cases a hostage situation with your own truck or the freight you're hauling.
How does an owner-operator find reliable roadside assistance in an age of predatory towing and its malicious invoicing -- think $2,300 for use of a traffic cone, $400 headset fees?
There are ways to fight back when it happens to you, but even with that advice in hand, defense here is the best strategy.
In any high-stakes bout, you'll need someone in your corner. Bob Passmore, VP of the personal lines department at the American Property Casualty Insurance Association, said insurers and roadside assistance networks make for good cornermen.
In any breakdown or downtime event "the clock is ticking" and a roadside assistance provider "may be also charging you storage," so at that moment, "the insurance company is in the same boat as the owner-operator," said Passmore, noting that many insurers do now offer their own roadside assistance networks. At the same time, he added that as tow invoices climb higher and higher some commercial lines might start to put limits on what they'll pay for a single towing event.
That's where reliable roadside-assistance networks come in. "Frankly it’s kind of a need," Passmore said of such networks. "If you can establish a network of reliable contractors who can tackle some of the situations ... it gives you some kind of recourse" in the event of a billing dispute.
As part of Passmore's work at the insurer's trade association, he said they run a survey of insurers' claims staff to "identify states and cities where towing issues are the biggest problem usually." Out of some 400 or so responses, Passmore said he'd get 100-150 cities listed as the worst, stressing just how widespread the problem is.
"Towing is the bane of any claims person's existence," he said, noting a single towed combination can have different insurance on the tractor, trailer, and cargo. "It's been a chronic problem. I've been in this business for 40 years and it's been a big problem since day one."
[Related: Beating predatory truck tows -- the Partners in Business guide]
Assistance networks: A chance at reliable tow-company vetting
How can an owner-operator ensure quailty towing and repair coverage at a fair price all across the country without manually vetting tens of thousands of service providers?
Amer Avdic, the founder and CEO of Find Truck Service, has probably wrestled with that problem as much as anyone alive.
"I've been doing this for a long time. This is my 18th year in business, and I've been in the field even longer," he said. Predatory towing, or simply bad actors in the roadside service industry, has "always been a problem, but it's never talked about enough" despite gaining "more visibility and publicity now."
Find Truck Service has long used reviews on its platform to vet service providers, but in the online world, reviews simply don't cut it anymore.
"It's hard to trust reviews now," he said, referencing research that shows a significant portion of reviews on sites like Google or Yelp are either fake or solicited. Find Truck Service has 30,000 vendors nationwide, including shops like truck washes, mobile tire shops, reefer technicians, you name it.
Can a service network with tens of thousands of providers possibly pick out all the bad apples? Unlike some web-based services that just scour the internet for anyone claiming to operate a business, Find Truck Service has a team that vets its vendors, Avdic added. "All vendors on the platform are sourced internally -- we don’t use crowdsourcing," he said. "About every six months we have a team that verifies the address, services provided, hours, making sure all the information is still the same."
Find Truck Service makes money from vendors advertising for better placement in the search results, and Avdic prides himself on presenting a 100% free service to owner-operators that takes into account their feedback and allows them to review the vendors.
[Related: $6,000 for 16 miles? Video sparks outrage over predatory towing]
With about 150,000 monthly active users entering nearly seven million searches for service a month, Find Truck Service's biggest benefit might actually be sort of an inside track with service providers, Avdic said. "One of the biggest perks and benefits of using us is we tell drivers to tell the vendor that they found them on FTS. That puts this whole user base behind them" and lets the vendor know you "didn’t just find them on Google randomly."
This avoids looking like a "sitting duck" for predatory pricing by letting the vendor think you're "new to this and don’t know how to manage breakdowns," he added. If the provider treats an owner-operator badly, then, too, the owner has "somewhere to go complain."
On-platform vendors in FTS might spend thousands to appear at the top of search results in the app in competitive areas, so they're incentivized to avoid getting flagged by users and to provide competitive service, said Avdic. He hopes to unveil a system he's "heavily invested in" and even filed for a patent on that could help reviewers weed out bad actors. For now, he's still confident in his vetted population of vendors and the system of checks and balances he has in place now.
[Related: New credit card from Find Truck Service]
It's certainly true that every day untold hundreds, maybe even thousands of truck tows happen all across the country without incident. Bob Passmore praised the towing industry for doing "brave, essential" work keeping roadways clear. On the FTS platform, it's not uncommon for users to flag what they believe is an unscrupulous towing company yet to be dead wrong, at once. Avdic said sometimes the complaints he investigates are greenhorn drivers who have no idea what a roadside service might cost. Such flags are routinely dismissed.
But with valid complaints, Avdic has a "three-strike rule" where he takes down a vendor if there are repeated complaints. Without naming names, Avdic suggested other big players in the space don't make the same effort.
Avdic's father worked as an owner-operator, and his father-in-law does, too. He hopes his upcoming review system will go farther in helping level the playing field for repair service and towing for small business trucking. One thing seems abundantly clear -- with an insurer or a roadside assistance network in your corner, your odds of good service improve after the initial sting of making the call wears away.
