Telco ombudsman complaints lowest in 18 months

FROM bad customer service to outrageous data charges, Australian telcos have really annoyed consumers. This is who’s copping the most complaints.

A Samsung Electronics Galaxy Note 5 smartphone is seen at the company's headquarters in Seoul

IT LOOKS like telcos are starting to listen to customer complaints, with the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman releasing their latest complaints figures.

The results show that Telstra is currently leads the big three telcos with the least amount of complaints, with the TIO recording just 6 complaints per 10,000 services between April and June 2015. This figure is down from 6.9 in the quarter before it and 7.2 in the same quarter last year. The telco says this result is due to Telstra listening to its customers and making sure they do things right the first time so customers don’t need to contact them or raise a complaint.

Vodafone has seen a huge drop in complaints, with just 6.3 per 10,000 services in the last quarter compared to 19.3 in the January — March quarter of 2014. This looks to be due to their new Hobart call centre and big investments in network.

Vodafone’s new call centre and its slides must be working.

Optus bucked the downward trend, with complaints rising over the last 12 months. The latest results showed the telco receiving 8.5 complaints per 10,000 services, while a year ago it received just 5.2. Optus has said that the rise has been due to an increase in landline and home internet faults in that period and coping with increased data usages. Interestingly, in this same period, Optus saw a slight decrease in its mobile customer base, going down from 9.4 million customers to 9.3. However, recently Optus has announced some of the best value plans on the market, so expect that drop to stop.

New plans and EPL rights are hoped to turn things around for Optus.

MVNO Amaysim received the lowest amount of complaints, with just 1.8 per 10,000, although it was slightly up from 1.3 a year ago.

Nearly half of all complaints to the TIO were about mobile phone services, while 28 per cent were landline and 26 per cent were about home internet services.

Of those, billing and payments was the category most people weren’t happy about, while that was closely followed by customer service and faults.

Melbourne is the capital city with the most complaints, with the top issue in the city being around excess data charges. Sydney is next, with complaints centring around disputed service charges.

Industry publication Commsday released their findings last month on which telco had the best coverage and speeds. Telstra lead the way in their tests, scoring 85 out of 100, up from 79 in 2014. In the 2014 test, Optus scored 61, while in 2015 its score rose to 78. Vodafone showed the biggest leap after it scored 51 last year, but jumped massively to 72 in 2015.