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Complaints Culture Is Sales Culture: What a Dealership’s Complaint Handling Reveals About Its GAP Insurance Selling
There’s a simple way to assess how seriously a business takes customers. Don’t start with the glossy brochures, start with the complaints.
In motor retail, complaints and compliance shouldn’t be a back-office inconvenience. Complaints are the clearest window into the underlying sales culture. And when that culture is “deny, ignore, delay”, it rarely stops at complaint handling. It almost always begins much earlier, at the point of sale where add-on products like GAP insurance can be sold for profit over suitability.
This post uses a real-world pattern that we see repeatedly across the sector, illustrated through one case file involving a UK motor dealership (in this instance, Cotswold Motor Group). The facts described below are drawn from documentation eventually disclosed under UK GDPR and from the complaint record itself. The complaint has been escalated to the Financial Ombudsman Service FOS).
If you think the lessons of PPI have been heard, you may want to read on.
A complaint that was met with silence
In this case, we raised a GAP mis-selling complaint on behalf of our client.
What happened next is the part that tells you everything about culture that is replicated across the overwhelming majority of the sector, from dealerships to lenders.
Instead of engaging with the substance of the complaint, setting out a position, providing evidence, showing what advice was given and what checks were made, the dealership’s approach was, in essence:
- no acknowledgement, and
- no response, and
- no evidence produced to support its position.
When a firm cannot (or will not) evidence what happened at the point of sale, the consumer is left with only one realistic route. The roulette of escalating the complaint to FOS, where the test should become painfully simple:
If you can’t evidence suitability and fair disclosure, you don’t get the benefit of the doubt.
And then came the next chapter, one that dealerships increasingly dislike and attempt to avoid.
UK GDPR disclosures: the documents the dealership didn’t volunteer
Alongside the complaint we pursued a UK GDPR data subject access request to obtain the personal data and associated records held about the sale.
The documentation disclosed (after much resistance, delay, and the inevitable pressure that follows) was revealing. Not because it contained anything exotic, but because it showed what was always likely to be true:
Commission: the dealership received over 50% of the our client’s GAP payment
The disclosed paperwork shows that the dealership received more than half of the money paid for the GAP policy as commission (or equivalent remuneration) for selling the product.
That is not a minor incentive, it is the sales driver.
It must also be pointed out that the dealership would almost definitely not be the only party in the chain to receive remuneration. It is almost always the case that there are multiple parties involved in GAP, from the underwriter to any one or more of the administrator, distributor, seller and lender. On a conservative reading, that pushes the total “take” across the chain towards a level that consumers would reasonably consider eye-watering.
If you’re wondering why this feels like PPI, it is because it is PPI in all but name.
The documents also show the underlying finance agreement was for a new vehicle.
That matters because the overwhelming majority of fully comprehensive motor insurance policies include ‘new-for-old replacement’ cover.
If a customer’s comprehensive insurance already provides replacement of a new vehicle within the first 12 months (or similar), the value of a GAP product during that period simply disappears.
The key point isn’t that “GAP is always useless on new cars”. It isn’t. The point is this:
A seller can’t assume value. They have a duty to check.
In this case file, there is no evidence whatsoever that the dealership checked whether our client’s motor policy included new-for-old cover (or equivalent), despite the obvious relevance to whether GAP added meaningful benefit in the first year.
That is a suitability failure, not a technicality.
The documentation also shows another basic but serious issue:
- The GAP policy term was 36 months, but
- the finance agreement term was 48 months.
So even the very basic checks confirms that our client was left with 12 months at the end of the finance agreement with no GAP cover at all.
This is not a clever legal argument. It’s a common-sense suitability problem.
If the customer’s risk exposure relates to the finance period, selling a policy that ends a year before the finance ends is the kind of mismatch that must be caught immediately, either by:
- a proper needs assessment,
- competent advice, or
- basic compliance controls.
When you combine a term mismatch with a lack of evidence that suitability checks were performed, the picture becomes impossible to defend.
“FOS shouldn’t struggle with this”, and that’s the point
With a case file like this, the issues are unusually clean:
- What commission was taken (and how much)
- Whether the customer’s existing insurance was checked for overlap
- Whether the GAP term matched the finance term
- Whether evidence exists of a suitability process at all
These are exactly the sort of concrete points the FOS can evaluate without needing mind-reading, and without needing to guess what “probably happened”.
If the evidence isn’t there, the firm’s defence often collapses into a single line:
“We sold it and the customer agreed.”
That line didn’t work for PPI and it cannot work here either if FOS carries out fair and competent investigations.
This is PPI all over again… and the wave is building
PPI didn’t become a scandal because the product was inherently evil. It became a scandal because it was sold for the benefit of the seller over the consumer.
If you swap “PPI” for “GAP add-ons”, the rhyme is uncomfortably similar.
Right now, many dealerships (and lenders where GAP is financed) are attempting to treat GAP mis-selling complaints as if they’re manageable one-off irritations that can be deflected or delayed.
But the sector should be careful. Because what looks like a trickle will soon become a tsunami.
A tsunami doesn’t arrive with an announcement. It arrives because the conditions were always there and everyone pretended they weren’t.
The uncomfortable conclusion
When a dealership ignores a complaint, refuses to evidence its position, and only discloses the real story when forced under UK GDPR, it doesn’t just signal poor complaint handling.
It signals how the product was sold in the first place.
And if the documents show high commission, missing suitability checks, and a cover/finance mismatch, then the question isn’t “Why did the customer complain?”
The question is how many customers haven’t complained yet?
Because they will, we’ll make sure of it.
