‘Going in the wrong direction’: ACMA releases data on Australian telco complaints
New data from the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has revealed that Australian telcos received fewer complaints in FY2023-24 than the previous year, but took longer to resolve them.
In the last financial year, telcos received a total of 899,691 complaints, down 13.3% from FY2022-23, however, the time taken to respond increased to an average of 6 days, up from 5.2.
The number of complaints that were escalated to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman remained steady at 6%.
FY2023-34 saw several failures from leading Australian telcos, including the unprecedented Optus outage late last year.
The outage left an estimated 10.2 million customers and 400,000 businesses without mobile or internet service, and prevented almost 3,000 calls to Triple Zero. Also affected were subscribers to other operators that rely on the Optus network, including Dodo, Amaysim, and Moose.
Earlier this week, a Senate Committee found Optus failed to provide “credible, honest and forthright” communication to its customers, and slammed the telco’s “inability to improve on the past”, referring to the malicious data breach from the previous year.
ACMA member and consumer lead, Samantha Yorke, said telcos are “going in the wrong direction” with response time, which can be very frustrating for customers.
“People need to feel confident that their telco services will work as expected, and that when something goes wrong, effective and timely action will be taken by their telco to fix it,” she said.
“Whether the complaint is about a phone or broadband service, potentially impacting people’s ability to work or connect with family and friends, or incorrect charges being applied, or other issues, telcos need to act quickly to rectify the problem and we would like to see a greater focus on this across the industry.”
Following recent legislative changes, ACMA will, for the first time, publish information about the performance of individual providers, including tables ranking them against key performance metrics. This data will be released in November 2024.
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Lauren McNamara is the associate editor at Mumbrella, covering the agency beat. She joined in November 2022 as editorial assistant, after completing a Bachelor of Communications (Journalism) at UTS.
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topics
ACMA
Australian Communications and Media Authority
complaints
customer complaint
Optus
Samantha Yorke
telco
Telstra
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