ROAD AMERICA ANNOUNCES SUCCESSFUL LAUNCH OF LOCATEME® UPGRADE TO ROADSIDE ASSISTANCE TECHNOLOGY

MIAMI – APRIL 21, 2011   In an exclusive partnership with researchers at AT&T, Miami, Florida-based Road America has developed, tested and now successfully launched a GPS technology solution for pinpointing breakdown locations in seconds.  This development dramatically improves the speed, accuracy and efficiency of locating the customer’s disabled vehicle through the very same telecommunications device they are using to contact the Road America 24-hour Response Centers.

With this enhancement, Road America is able to pinpoint the customer’s precise coordinates to ensure that their service providers on scene arrive at the vehicle’s exact location –even if the customer doesn’t know where they are.  They are able to respond to emergency assistance calls with much greater reliability and speed – which means ensuring the customer’s safety and increasing their satisfaction with the service.

The IT Department at Road America has been on a mission to solve this problem for many years, because it’s always been the weakest link in the emergency roadside process.  The mapping engines on which the industry relied previously were not server based and depended on data that was only intermittently updated by the software companies. It was an expensive and time-consuming procedure and one that had the potential to be perceived poorly by the customer. The Telematics devices found on some newer model cars were not widely available and didn’t operate smoothly across all platforms. Road America’s strategists knew the technology could be developed; government emergency crews used something like it, based on triangulation, but this development was specifically not available to private companies.

After months of discussions, working with AT&T and with TechnoCom as the aggregator, the team finally came up with an elegant solution. It would be hosted in-house, minimizing the cost of the service, loading geo-codes for all the service provider locations and displaying tie-back destinations in real time for the client to select.  Road America designed its own locking mechanism on top of the other data base locks so that sensitive customer information is never displayed without the customer’s prior permission.

What has this done to the roadside assistance process?  With the new Road America LocateMe® technology, at least two minutes can be trimmed from the average call length for this situation, the time it takes to identify the customer, ascertain the location of their vehicle, and confirm the dispatch service. From the perspective of a stranded driver, this means reduced waiting times and a quicker return to safety.  For Road America and its client companies, it can also mean reduced processing costs and increased customer satisfaction with the program offerings.

Road America’s initial results have been more than encouraging.  LocateMe® has been successfully launched as a cross-carrier platform and, after six  months of testing, the company is consistently achieving a 98% success rate in using the technology to immediately, accurately pinpoint the location of a distress call, whether it’s from a landline or a wireless device.

In the process of developing LocateMe®, the Road America team recognized the possibilities this technology offers for the company’s future development. They will be moving to use it to manage the service provider network’s vehicles – which kind of specialized equipment does each truck carry, and where are they currently located.  And the move after that will be to fully digital dispatch, communicating directly with the trucks in the field.

ABOUT ROAD AMERICA: Road America is a preeminent provider of private label and co-branded roadside and vehicle related services for insurance companies, OEM manufacturers, automotive service contract companies, and other corporations and associations.  Since 1978, they have set the standard for providing high quality assistance services in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico to more than 22 million customers of their 120 major corporate clients.  For USA and Puerto Rico services, Road America provides 24-hour assistance from their Response Centers located in Miami, Florida and Columbus, Georgia.  Canadian services are provided through the Road Canada Response Center in Cambridge, Ontario.  Road America is a wholly owned United States subsidiary of MAPFRE, one of the major European auto insurers, with worldwide revenues in 2010 of over $25 billion US.

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For more information, contact:

Stacey Harth

AT&T Corporate Communications

(404) 986-1833

moc.ttanull@htrah.yecats

ROAD AMERICA ROLLS OUT NEW LOCATION-BASED EMERGENCY ROADSIDE ASSISTANCE OFFERING WITH AT&T

miami –  APRIL 18, 2011 — Mobile location technology is playing a new role in the evolution of emergency roadside assistance, thanks to an innovative location-based solution developed by AT&T and Road America, a leading roadside assistance service provider.

Previously, most drivers needed to have GPS units installed in their cars to be located in the event of an accident or roadside breakdown, but a new solution offered by Road America is bringing this important safety feature to any basic cell, landline or smartphone on any network.

Using AT&T Location Information Services, Road America has developed LocateMe Service® to help capture vehicle breakdown locations for customers calling from any wireless or landline communications device. This innovative, cross-carrier offering helps drastically improve the speed, accuracy and efficiency of locating a customer’s disabled vehicle through the same telecommunications device used to call Road America’s 24-hour Response Centers. In addition, the network-based location solution prevents users from needing to download applications or use a specific platform in order to be located.

“When developing this solution our goal was simple: find a way to quickly and accurately locate disabled vehicles by using the technology drivers often already have on them – cell phones – and we needed to be able to do it regardless of which carrier they were on,” said Dennis Fantis, president of Road America. “We teamed up with AT&T to create this revolutionary offering so we are now better equipped to respond to emergency assistance calls with greater reliability and speed, ultimately enhancing our ability to keep customers safe on the road.”

AT&T Location Information Services are designed to provide AT&T’s enterprise customer base with a highly reliable, operationally managed service where network-based location information can be obtained for wireless or landline communication devices and corporate assets. This service is intended to take advantage of AT&T’s cloud capabilities in order to improve operational efficiencies, increase customer satisfaction and control costs for a variety of industries such as financial services, retail, healthcare, education, travel and hospitality and manufacturing.

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About AT&T

AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) is a premier communications holding company. Its subsidiaries and affiliates – AT&T operating companies – are the providers of AT&T services in the United States and around the world. With a powerful array of network resources that includes the nation’s fastest mobile broadband network, AT&T is a leading provider of wireless, Wi-Fi, high speed Internet, voice and cloud-based services. A leader in mobile broadband and emerging 4G capabilities, AT&T also offers the best wireless coverage worldwide of any U.S. carrier, offering the most wireless phones that work in the most countries.  It also offers advanced TV services under the AT&T U-verse^® and AT&T │DIRECTV brands. The company’s suite of IP-based business communications services is one of the most advanced in the world. In domestic markets, AT&T Advertising Solutions and AT&T Interactive are known for their leadership in local search and advertising.

Additional information about AT&T Inc. and the products and services provided by AT&T subsidiaries and affiliates is available at http://www.att.com.  This AT&T news release and other announcements are available at http://www.att.com/newsroom and as part of an RSS feed at www.att.com/rss. Or follow our news on Twitter at @ATT.

About Road America

Road America is a preeminent provider of private label and co-branded roadside and vehicle related services for insurance companies, OEM manufacturers, automotive service contract companies, and other corporations and associations.  Since 1978, they have set the standard for providing high quality assistance services in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico to more than 22 million customers of their 120 major corporate clients.  For USA and Puerto Rico services, Road America provides 24-hour assistance from their Response Centers located in Miami, Florida and Columbus, Georgia.  Canadian services are provided through the Road Canada Response Center in Cambridge, Ontario.  Road America is a wholly owned United States subsidiary of MAPFRE, one of the major European auto insurers, with worldwide revenues in 2010 of over $25 billion US.

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