Millions of consumers unhappy with telco customer service

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 23 November 2010 04:24

IT Policy - Regulation

The Australian Communications Consumers Action Network (ACCAN) has released the results of a survey saying it shows that a third of people who lodge a complaint with a telco are unhappy with the outcome.

ACCAN commissioned the research from Galaxy Research and says "It found one in two telco customers have experienced a problem with their phone or Internet service provider in the past year'¦Although two-thirds of people said they tried to have their complaint resolved by calling their provider, one in three were dissatisfied with the outcome."

However only four percent of these customers took their complaint to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman. Extrapolating from the survey sample to the population as a whole, ACCAN director of policy & campaigns Elissa Freeman, concluded: "The 230,000 or so complaints that make it to the TIO each year represent just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the number of people with unresolved complaints."

"This research tells us that there are 2.3 million Australians who are unhappy with the way their telco handled a problem they experienced with their phone or Internet service in the past year."

Galaxy found that "The most commonly cited reasons why people did not take their complaint to the TIO were that they didn't think there was any point (60 percent) or that it was too difficult or too much effort (47 percent). Twenty nine percent of respondents said they had not heard of the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman."

ACCAN is calling on ACMA to introduce a complaints-handling standard for the industry as part of its telco customer service inquiry, 'Reconnecting the Customer', which the ACMA has initiated in response to the increasing number of complaints to the TIO in recent years.

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