My account manager will not give me downtime data
Restaurant chains read this as obstruction and it is more often incapacity. Account managers at delivery platforms work with tooling built for handling support cases, not for exporting a restaurant’s availability history, and in several platforms no such export exists in a form anybody can send you. So the request as usually phrased, asking for downtime data for a site over a period, has no button behind it. The productive move is to stop asking for their record and start asking them to confirm yours.
Why would the data not exist in a usable form?
Availability is a by-product of the platform’s operation, not a product it reports.
The platform knows the state of every storefront at every moment, in the sense that its systems act on it. That is not the same as having a report that renders it per merchant, per period, in a shareable format. Building that report is work nobody has commissioned, because merchants have historically not asked.
The absence is therefore structural and not a decision to withhold, which matters because it changes what pressure achieves.
What should I ask for instead?
Confirmation of specific periods, with the periods supplied by you.
“Our Bristol site appears to have been unavailable on Deliveroo between 19:40 and 22:05 on 12 August. Can you confirm what state was applied and by whom?” is a question an account manager can put into their own tooling and answer.
That is a narrow, checkable request. It also reverses the burden in a useful way: instead of asking them to produce a history, you are asking them to verify a claim, which is a smaller task and one their systems can do.
Where do my own periods come from?
From reading the storefront yourself, on a schedule, which is the only source outside the platform.
This is the part that has to be in place before the conversation. A group that starts measuring the week after a dispute has nothing to bring to it, and a group that has been measuring for a quarter can put a list on the table. A Kitchain (kitchain.co) series is that list, and the question in the paragraph above is written straight out of one of its rows.
What if they dispute my record?
Then you have moved the conversation somewhere useful, because now there are two records to reconcile instead of one assertion to dismiss.
Disagreement about a specific window is productive. It gets somebody technical involved and it usually resolves, because one of the two records is checkable. Disagreement about whether a site has been having problems generally never resolves at all.
Be ready to explain your method plainly: what was checked, from where, how often. A method that survives description is one that survives challenge.
Should I escalate past the account manager?
Only once you have a pattern, and then to a commercial conversation, not to support.
An account manager who cannot produce data is not the obstacle. The obstacle is that nothing in the relationship currently prices interruptions. That is a contract and commercial review subject, and it needs a quarter of evidence and not an incident.
In the European Union there is a further route, since Regulation 2019/1150 requires an internal complaint-handling system that is free and accessible and requires named mediators in the terms. We have not verified an equivalent for the United Kingdom, so we do not assert one.
What is a reasonable expectation?
That the platform confirms specific incidents you identify, and that neither side pretends a full history is available.
Setting that expectation explicitly with your account manager saves months. It also tends to improve their engagement, because you are asking for something they can actually deliver instead of something they have to keep declining.