Telco complaints going down, but ACMA says there's still work to be done

Telco complaints per 10,000 services have decreased by 7.9 percent in 2021-22, according to the Australia Communications and Media Authority (ACMA).

There was also a 33 percent decline in the number of complaints that required the intervention of the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO), with 3 percent fewer complaints being escalated to the TIO compared to 2020–21.

The resolution time of these complaints also declined, with complaints resolved close to five days faster than the previous year, according to the ACMA’s annual telco complaints report 2021-22 which contains complaints from over thirty medium and large Australian telcos.

This improvement comes after the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN) last year called for telcos to resolve complaints faster.

While there were significant improvements in the number of complaints compared to previous years, the ACMA said that there are still over one million complaints per year.

ACMA chair Nerida O’Loughlin said, “Telco services have become essential to our daily lives, and more than a million complaints per year shows people are still experiencing too many issues with their phone and internet.”

Further, while the resolution time for complaints has decreased to seven days, some telcos are averaging more than ten days before complaints are resolved, suggesting this needs to be addressed by the telcos.

The TIO recently slammed telcos for complaints about mobile services. The watchdog’s report ‘Investigating complaints about essential mobile services’, stated that between July 2020 and March 2022, overall complaints decreased while mobile-related complaints increased to 63,000, higher than internet, landline and multiple services complaints combined. Earlier this year, the ACMA published a report finding that telcos needed to improve how they handled small business complaints.

“The industry needs to make further improvements to address common telco pain points—prompt and effective communication, customer service, billing issues and the protection of vulnerable consumers—to drive down customer complaints,” O’Loughlin said.

Regarding the recent Optus data breach, O’Loughlin said that it will mean a “further increase [of] complaints to Optus and the broader telco sector over the coming months.”