A report by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has found that telcos attracted slightly more than one million complaints in the 2020-21 financial year.
The ACMA’s Annual telco complaints report 2020/21 showed the average time taken for telcos to resolve customer complaints was 12.2 days.
Member of the ACMA, Fiona Cameron said rules introduced in 2018-19 had contributed to a decline in complaints of more than 35 per cent from just under 1.7 million, but the time taken by telcos to fix problems had gone up by 49 per cent from 8.2 days.
“The time taken to resolve complaints is going in the wrong direction and one million complaints a year is still far too many,” Ms Cameron said.
“With so many people working from home due to COVID restrictions, it is more important than ever that telcos prioritise fixing problems and we are looking to industry to improve in this area,” she said.
Ms Cameron said the new figures also showed the rate of complaints that were not resolved by telcos and had to be escalated to the Industry Ombudsman had increased from 7.8 per cent to 10.7 per cent in the two years.
“This suggests that some telcos are not handling complaints at all well, and other smaller telcos are, in fact, not recording complaints at all,” she said.
“Seven smaller telcos have absurdly high escalation rates, just above 50 per cent, which indicates that some complaints are not being recorded in the first place and only being logged when escalated to the Ombudsman.”
Ms Cameron said the ACMA would follow up with these telcos separately to ensure they understood their obligations to log all complaints as required under the Telecommunications (Consumer Complaints Handling) Industry Standard.
The ACMA’s six-page Report can be accessed online at this PS News link.
