TELECOMMUNICATIONS COMPLAINTS-IN-CONTEXT REPORT HIGHLIGHTS CUSTOMER SERVICE AND COMPLAINTS HANDLING PERFORMANCE

Sydney, 10 June 2020:  Communications Alliance published its most recent Complaints-in-Context report today, with results for the three quarterly periods since the report was expanded to capture a much larger group of Australia’s telecommunications service providers.

The report details the complaints received by the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO) per 10,000 Services in Operation (SIO) for participating service providers for each quarter. It allows for comparison of the customer service and complaint handing performance of providers, regardless of their size.

For all participating service providers, there were 7.2 (Jul-Sep ’19), 6.1 (Oct-Dec ’19) and 7.2 (Jan-Mar ’20) complaints per 10,000 SIOs.

For the most recent quarter, for example, the result means that, across the participants, one service in every 1,389 services in operation during the quarter experienced an issue that resulted in a complaint being made to the TIO.

The industry-driven report is published by Communications Alliance, using complaints data provided by the TIO and services in operation data supplied by participating providers.

This report features an expanded list of participants, compared to previous years and some minor changes to the definition of SIOs. This means that the ratios for all participants and individual providers are not directly comparable to the results published prior to July 2019.

Communications Alliance CEO John Stanton said: “Complaints-in-Context is the most comprehensive tool Australian consumers have ever had to directly compare the performance of all the major telcos.

“Although the expansion means we can’t compare these contextualised results to previous years, the TIO’s most recent quarterly report, for example, showed that total complaints to the Ombudsman had dropped nearly 14% in comparison to the Jan-Mar quarter last year.”