The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has released its 2023-24 telco complaint data, revealing a decrease in the number of complaints received by Australian telcos. However, despite the decrease in complaints, the time taken to resolve these issues has increased from an average of 5.2 days in 2022-23 to 6 days in 2023-24.

ACMA member and consumer lead, Samantha Yorke, expressed frustration over the increased resolution time. "The time taken to resolve complaints is going in the wrong direction, which is very frustrating for telco 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."

The data shows a drop from over a million complaints in 2022-23 to 899,691 in 2023-24. In addition, the number of complaints that were not resolved by telcos and had to be escalated to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO) remained steady at just over 6 per cent. The full telco complaints report 2023-24, which contains customer complaints data for the top 34 Australian telcos by services supplied, has been published on the ACMA website.

Following recent legislative changes, the ACMA will be publishing information about the performance of individual providers, including tables ranking the telcos against key performance metrics, starting with the July - September 2024 data.