IMPROVEMENTS RECORDED IN TELECOMMUNICATIONS CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

Sydney, 31 October 2017 - The latest Telecommunications Customer Satisfaction Survey has produced positive results across a range of customer satisfaction indicators, while still highlighting areas for industry improvement.

The quarterly national survey, carried out for Communications Alliance by Roy Morgan Research, shows that overall satisfaction with customer service has increased, with 83% of customers reporting they are satisfied/neutral, and those who were very dissatisfied decreased from 9% to 5%.

This reverses the decreasing trend of the last two quarters, and Communications Alliance CEO John Stanton said “the work Industry – including service providers and nbn - have been doing to improve customer experience in the light of current difficulties is reflected in this quarter’s results, and in the release of the recent Complaints in Context report earlier this month.

“Industry acknowledges there is still much work to do to turn these encouraging signs into a sustained positive trend, and is redoubling its effort to achieve that outcome.” 

Satisfaction with complaint handling has risen significantly in the last quarter. Stanton said “the previous 2 quarters saw a disappointing decrease in customers satisfaction with complaint handling. However, this quarter we have seen a jump from 60% to 71% of customers being satisfied or neutral with their providers’ complaint handling.” The survey also showed that the percentage of customers very dissatisfied with complaint handling decreased from 22% to 14%. The percentage of customers surveyed who made a complaint in the last 6 months also decreased from 45% to 42%.

Additionally, the proportion of customers satisfied with the ease of understanding their bill has remained fairly steady across previous surveys, with 86% reporting they are satisfied/neutral in the most recent survey. However, we also see a drop in the percentage of customers who were very dissatisfied, from 5% last quarter to 3% in this survey.

The survey, conducted in September 2017, comes amid a challenging time for industry and consumers, as customer migration to nbn-based services gathers pace and the sharply rising demand for streamed and downloaded video content puts additional pressure on some types of services.

This is the sixteenth wave in an ongoing quarterly survey series designed to measure the overall experience of Australian telco customers – particularly in relation to key customer ‘touch points’ covered by the Telecommunications Consumer Protections (TCP) Code 2015, which is currently being revised.

Industry is engaging in ongoing discussions on strategies to improve customer service and satisfaction across products.

The full survey results are available at the following link.