TIO Complaint - Should I lodge Complaint?

Posted at 28/06/2016 10:45pm

Should you log a compaint against your ISP? Not yet.

What Phone or Internet Service Providers can you log complaints against in Australia?

We’ll if they’re listed on the TIO’s website, then you have freedom to log complaints against anyone of them through an online form which you can find on their website.

ISP’s that regularly receive complaints are in no particular order: Telstra, Optus, Dodo, iiNet, Internode, TPG and many others, but we could generalise with this particular list to say they are the Top 6 Providers known to Aussie consumers. You can litterally view the TIO Complaint list for the larger ISP on their website, but make sure you come back to hear what we have to say.

Angry and dissatisfied ISP customers feel they have nowhere else to turn other than the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman. Probably after hours of endless conversations to Customer Service Reps located in overseas call centres and multiple modem reboots, people are plainly fed up with the situation. Not forgetting to mention all those lengthy call wait times of 1 hour+ before you actually end up on the phone to a human being. Listen, we all understand. From a consumer POV, and you’re in this situation you fee trapped. Its not like you can just say ‘transfer me to your accounts department’ and cancel your contract.

 Australian consumers need alternatives within the telco space – It almost feels that the ISP’s are willing to do anything to win your custom, and the signup process is generally straight forward (most of the time), except once they have your signature on the dotted line that’s when your experience most likely goes out the window.

What causes ISP customers to log complaints with the ISP?

Billing – Some common reasons customers log complaints to an ISP is for billing reasons. Many times, a customer has received the wrong bill amount, paid a bill then hasn’t been marked off as paid in the Service Providers accounting system, or even received someone else’s bill summary and expected to pay it. Situations like this, leave you feeling vulnerable to potential legal action that could and may in fact affect your credit rating. Seriously, the last thing you want is a bad mark against your name which generally stays on file for 5 years and up to 7 years depending on the situation.

With the above said, if the ISP has clearly made an incorrect or poor decision which was incorrect, it will only be YOU who will run around trying to resolve the issue, which some times can take months of back-and-forth between you, your Service Provider and VEDA (the credit reporting agency).

If you discovered that a Service Provider has listed a default against you, you will find that on your credit report. If you would like to dispute your credit report, simply visit this link.

Incorrect Usage – Going over your data allowance takes you through two thought processes. The first, leads you to think “How did I go over my allowance of 10GB?”

“Did, I watch too much Youtube or send too many snaps on snapchat?” You end up puzzled. Also, paranoid thoughts of maybe “Did I leave my WiFi hotspot on and perhaps my neighbour has secretly logged in and used my data?”.

The real answer to that is NO! You probably downloaded one too many mobile updates or fell asleep watching some live streaming app on your smartphone when you weren’t connected to your home WiFi connection. Finito!

That leads us to the second thought, of now you’ve got thoughts of having some drastic and enormous bill you now need to pay off somehow, and you get visuals of eating plain rice for the next 30 days just to front your mobile streaming addiction, ah I know you J.

In terms of going over your data allowance, you might just want to speak to your Service Provider first before you place your ‘case’ into the hands of the Telecommunications Ombudsman who may or may not request or have the ISP look into your website history or files you have downloaded during the complaint period. Especially if you’ve been on the naughty side of browsing the internet. 

Anyway, I’ll leave that to your discretion but seriously, I think Optus charge $10 per GB extra for overage, why even bother, I’d just front up if it was an odd occasion and pay the amount due if it was only a couple of GB over, seriously is it worth your time even?

Alternate ways to mitigate overage on your mobile or home broadband plans are to download apps that let you know when you’ve gone over your limit, and in fact I know Samsung comes with that feature built in, but not sure about Apple, just look up the APP store.

Faults – What really dissatisfies customers, is when they log faults with their Service Provider for service related issues, where the internet signal is dropping, cutting out, slow download and the like. These faults can sometimes be hard to pinpoint and require the skills of an engineer or internet technician to attend your premises and perform preliminary checks on your line, modem and service.

Many customers spend endless hours either on hold, or talking to a call centre representative trying to diagnose the problems, all the way from the telephone lead and computer settings. Most of the time problems either located on the internal wiring on the customer’s premises and requires a licensed ACMA technician to attend. However, many customers tend to throw their hands up and feel the last resort is to contact the TIO (telecommunications industry ombudsman) and log a complaint as they feel helpless. We totally understand.

Are there alternatives to logging a complaint with the TIO?

There are certainly ways you can take to mitigate any issues on ‘your side of the fence’ if its related to a fault related enquiry where your phone or internet service is down, and that is to engage a third party technician such as Mr Telco, to visit your premises and make sure that everything is fine to your Service Provider’s network boundary point, or NBP.

The NBP is the point in which your ISP wipes their hands of all responsibility from a service delivery perspective, and is different depending if you reside within a house, apartment or commercial dwelling. To understand where your boundary is, just call our Mr Telco technicians for assistance.

Mr Telco’s approach to resolving your internet faults comes with the highest regard and care taken, we work separate from the ISP’s however were able to prove where your fault lies and resolve all faults internally of your home or business.

Let’s say, you do engage our licensed  technicians and we isolate the fault to being beyond your responsibility, we actually issue our customers a Service Fault Report, which details the fault, potential location and we provide a resolution too. We issue our report via method of e-mail on a PDF document, and generally ask the customers to forward our Service Fault Report onto your ISP or if you like, just forward our findings directly onto the TIO.

Having a Service Fault Report from a technician will not only speed up the process with your dealings and clarify the problems we’ve found, however it will provide YOU as the customer ‘peace of mind’ that there are no outstanding or underlying issues on your property that may have caused the fault.

If you would like to , don’t hesitate as we’re here to help you.