The TIO received 25,907 complaints in the March quarter 2005, a 10.9 per cent increase on the December quarter 2004.

Of these 10,755 (41.6 per cent) were related to landline services, 11,141 (42.9 per cent) were related to mobile services and 4,011 (15.6 per cent) were related to internet services.

This was the first quarter that complaints about mobile services have overtaken those about landline services. Complaints about internet services also grew at the expense of landlines, increasing from 14.8 per cent of all complaints in the December quarter.

Privacy

At 2.5 per cent of total complaints, privacy accounts for a very small percentage of the TIO’s complaint total. Nevertheless, there was a 41 per cent increase in landline privacy complaints (from 355 to 501) in the March quarter. The increase in this category in mobile services was more subdued at 10.1 per cent (from 128 in the December quarter to 141 in the March quarter) while internet complaints remained static.
The biggest increase in landline services was in the Carriage Service Provider Telemarketing sub-category, where complaints rose from 93 to 187. This category relates to those Members who continue telemarketing customers despite being requested not to.

Billing

In the March quarter, billing complaints fell as a percentage of the overall complaints total, dropping from 28.7 per cent in December to 27.4 per cent. The decline was driven by falls in the landline and internet services categories.

The decline in landline billing complaints was solely because of a big decrease in the International Data sub-category, from 1100 to 638. This restores the International Data sub-category to levels received (530) in the September quarter 2004. Overall, the TIO received 3156 complaints about landline billing in the March quarter compared with 3482 in the December quarter. With internet services, the fall was more modest from 1054 to 1014.

The increase in mobile billing complaints is showing no let up with the March quarter registering a 35.1 per cent increase over the previous period. Since the January quarter 2004, mobile billing complaints have risen by 125 per cent from 1293 complaints to 2917.

Credit Control

Credit control complaints continued to rise across all three services, but the category’s share of total complaints fell from 15.3 per cent in the December quarter to 12.4 per cent in the March quarter.

With landline services, declines in the Payment Arrangement and Debt Recovery sub-categories in the December quarter were reversed with increases of 24.0 per cent and 17.6 per cent respectively. The Debt Recovery sub-category (787 complaints) accounts for more than half the landline credit control complaints.

Mobile credit control complaints rose by 15.2 per cent from 1339 to 1543. One significant trend was that CDMA complaints increased at the expense of GSM (27.5 per cent and 72.4 per cent)

As with last quarter the greatest source of complaint was Debt Recovery N/A GSM, with 43 per cent (665) of all mobile credit control complaints.

Faults

The percentage of faults recorded as a share of overall complaints remained static this quarter at 14.1 per cent. Nevertheless, internet faults complaints rose by 37.4 per cent

This increase was driven by ADSL where the sub categories Log On Difficulties, Outage, and Dropouts rose by 69 per cent, 34 per cent and 28 per cent respectively.

ACIF Code Breaches

The TIO recorded 1890 code breaches for the March quarter, an almost 10 per cent increase on the 1725 breaches in the December 2004 quarter.

Credit Management and billing were the two leading areas of code breaches.

Statistics

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