ACCAN recently submitted to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA)'s consultation on new rules on telco complaints handling. The ACMA has amended the Telecommunications (Consumer Complaints Handling) Industry Standard 2018 after the Optus outage of November 2023 exposed issues with the complaints handling processes of telecommunications providers.
In this submission, ACCAN recommends that the ACMA:
- Amend the definitions of complaint, urgent complaint, and urgent network outage complaint to meet community expectations.
- Include greater consideration of consumer vulnerability by introducing a definition of vulnerability, obligations for carriage service providers to consider vulnerability when prioritising complaints and recognition of the inherent vulnerability of consumers experiencing a service outage.
- Include outages caused by natural disasters in the definition of network outage complaint.
- Regarding remedies and resolutions, place an obligation on carriage service providers to return the consumer to the state they were in prior to the complaint to the extent that is reasonably practicable.
- Further reduce the response times outlined in Part 3 and 3A.
- Require CSPs to seek consent before closing a complaint or network outage complaint.
- Enable consumers to achieve complete resolution of all network outage-related issues through a single complaint.
- Introduce greater minimum requirements for complaints handling and network outage complaints handling processes.
- Enable complaints to be made by or on behalf of a class of consumers.
- Include obligations that require CSPs to report breaches or non-compliance with obligations and timeframes, including systemic issues, on an annual basis to the ACMA.
- Introduce training requirements for complaints handling personnel.
- Clarify the role of the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman.
- Differentiate a provider’s complaints handling policy from a complaint handling process.
