Telcos told to shape up as consumer complaints surge

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 22 October 2008 16:32

IT Policy - Government Tech Policy

Mobile phone services, which now outnumber landlines in Australia, caused the most concern, with the TIO logging 47,300 complaints this year compared with 33,670 last year. Another 13,899 complaints were received about mobile premium services.

"A significant proportion of mobile premium service complaints were from people who said that they had not requested the service in the first place or if they had, they were unable to unsubscribe," Ombudsman, Deirdre  O'Donnell said.

This is the first full year that the TIO has dealt with, under a separate scheme, complaints about premium mobile services, but these alone, at just under 14,000 compared to 7000 for half of last year, were not enough to account for the huge surge.

The TIO has offered no specific explanation for the increase but does note that complaints about customer service saw the biggest rise, accounting for about 25,000 additional complaints this year to become the leading source of complaints.

It explained that "Customer service complaint issues are mostly recorded as secondary issues to primary complaints. For example, a complaint may be made up of several complaint issues including a problem with a bill or direct debit, or a delay in rectifying a fault or connecting a service."

The main drivers for customer service complaint issues included: claims by consumers that service providers provided incorrect or inadequate advice about the complaint event (38.7 percent); service providers failing to action consumers' requests, for example, the cancellation of a service, updating a consumer's address details or the transfer of a service (27.4 percent); consumers being unable to contact the service providers (14 percent) or having lengthy wait times before being able to speak with a customer service representative of the service provider (13.3 percent); discourtesy (6.2 percent).