Study finds towing complaints center on company operations, not the tow itself

A new analysis of 5,916 one- and two-star Google reviews of 285 towing companies in eight U.S. metros found that how the company is run was the main reason behind 86.9% of negative reviews. The findings suggest operators may face more customer backlash over staff conduct, pricing, communication and vehicle release than over the tow event itself.

Why it matters: - The study points to operational breakdowns as the main driver of negative customer sentiment in towing, which could affect how operators train staff, set fees and handle calls. - The findings focus on what reviewers wrote, not on whether any complaint was factually correct. - The review themes may help towing companies identify recurring friction points in the customer experience.

What happened: - A study reviewed 5,916 written one- and two-star Google reviews of 285 high-review-count towing companies. - The sample covered towing companies in Phoenix, Dallas, Atlanta, Charlotte, Columbus, Denver, Tampa and Kansas City. - The study was published by Sales Roadmap and conducted by Kamyar Shah, a fractional CMO and founder of World Consulting Group. - The reviews came from up to the 60 lowest-rated reviews retrieved per business, with each review containing at least five words. - The review dates ranged from 2010-03-09 to 2026-09-30. - A model classified how the company is run as the main reason in 86.9% of the reviews. - The tow itself was the main reason in 11.6% of the reviews. - Another 1.5% of reviews were unclear.

The details: - Staff conduct was the most common theme, appearing in 55.0% of the 5,916 reviews. - Pricing and fees appeared in 35.5% of the reviews. - Communication failure appeared in 34.2% of the reviews. - Response time appeared in 22.4% of the reviews. - The study says these themes overlap, so one review could include more than one issue. - The model assigned the private-property or impound tow label to 1,089 reviews, or 18.4% of the total. - In those reviews, the reviewer may not have chosen or hired the company. - Within the 1,089 private-property or impound reviews, pricing and fees appeared in 52.1% and vehicle release in 24.1%. - The study did not measure local rules on private-property tows or impound fees. - One reviewer wrote that "a substantial portion of the bill was a $250 administrative lien-release fee". - Another reviewer wrote that "the driver yelled at me, told me he just pulled up the map and he would be there, then he hung up the phone." - The study’s sample included 311 towing companies with 163,832 lifetime Google reviews. - Of those reviews, 19,747, or 12.1%, were one or two stars. - Of those reviews, 84.6% were five stars. - Of the 311 companies, 285 had at least one review in the corpus. - None of the study’s figures is a share of customers.

Between the lines: - The findings suggest that customer anger often centers on service delivery, billing and communication rather than the towing event alone. - The private-property and impound subset may reflect a different complaint pattern because the customer did not always initiate the tow. - The report is based on model classification, so the results describe patterns in review language rather than verified incidents. - No sample was checked against human coding. - The study did not check any bill or determine whether any fee was lawful. - On a binary test of whether the issue was how the business is run versus every other main reason, two models agreed 96.5% of the time, with a Cohen’s kappa of 0.801.

What's next: - Shah said towing owners can use the reviews as a checklist of moments to examine in their own records. - The study and its full method are available in the full study. - Shah said the research counts what reviewers wrote and how a model labeled it, and does not judge whether any company or reviewer was right. - More information about Shah is available at his website and World Consulting Group.

The bottom line: - Negative towing reviews are driven more by operational complaints than by the tow itself, with staff conduct, pricing and communication emerging as the main pressure points.