TIO Annual Report 2002/03

Profile Of Complainant

The TIO seeks to limit its requests for personal information from complainants as far as is practically possible and endeavours to ensure that the National Privacy Principles are very strictly applied to every complainant in every case. That said, certain information must be collected from complainants in order, firstly, to facilitate an investigation and, secondly, to ensure the correct allocation of resources within the TIO. For example, the TIO will ask for the personal address details of the complainant and the nature and number/address of their service, and other information such as how they came to know about the TIO. Some of this information is provided to the telephone or Internet provider involved in the dispute so that it can respond to the complaint.

92.3% of complaints to the TIO in 2002/03 were related to residential services, 6.8% to small business services, 0.7% to government services and 0.2% to services operated by charities. This represents a slight decline in small business complaints as a proportion of total complaints – a factor discussed in more detail below.

56% of complainants were male and 44% were female.

90.6% of people contacted the TIO via its toll free number and made a complaint over the phone. This is a slight decrease on the 92.9% reported last year and may be attributed to a slight increase in the proportion of complaints submitted via email, up from 2.8% to 4.5%.

Although it’s not hard to see why a majority of complainants prefer to use the telephone to lodge a complaint – the TIO’s call answering performance is excellent and nine in ten complaints made over the phone can be settled on the spot - it is nonetheless interesting that email is not increasing in popularity.

The Complainant Satisfaction Survey conducted by Sweeney Research sought to find out why so many complainants choose to contact the TIO by telephone. The surveyors asked respondents who had contacted the TIO by telephone firstly whether they had access to the Internet and secondly whether they knew they could lodge a complaint online. Although two thirds of respondents said they had access to the Internet, only one third said they knew they could lodge a complaint online. This indicates that awareness of the TIO’s online facilities is relatively low.

Indeed, “referred by” statistics collected during 2002/03 indicate that less than 3% of complainants came to know about the TIO via the Internet. By contrast, 19.2% of complainants said they came to know about the TIO via directories, including White Pages, 12.7% said they heard of the TIO via word of mouth and 11% were referred to the TIO by a telecommunications company, hopefully in accordance with the industry’s Complaint Handling Code of Practice. This last statistic, however, does not accord with the finding of the Sweeney Research Complainant Satisfaction Survey that just 7% of complainants surveyed were referred to the TIO by their telephone company.

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