Australians relatively happy with telecom service

Regardless of whether they are rural or urban, most Australians are satisfied with their telecommunications services, a customer satisfaction survey released by the Communications Alliance revealed.

The study was conducted by Roy Morgan Research in June as part of an ongoing quarterly series measuring telco customers' overall experience.

While open to analysis, the survey's results found that 81 percent of customers were satisfied or neutral about their service while 7 percent were very dissatisfied with the service they get. The results were pretty much in line with previous studies, the organization said.

"Many service providers already deliver outstanding customer service and the industry's concerted improvement efforts, combined with the impact of the TCP (Telecommunications Consumer Protections) Code, has already seen customer complaints to industry ombudsman fall by more than 20 percent," Communications Alliance CEO John Stanton said in an organization press release.

Still, he conceded, service providers have room to improve. Only one in four (25 percent) of customers reported being very satisfied with their service and only 39 percent claimed to be satisfied. Part of the reason could be the cost. Thirty-five percent of respondents said they got a bill that was "higher than expected," an even higher percentage than the previous report when 34 percent thought they were being charged too much.

The report did note that everyone is on equal footing in the continent country.

"There is no significant difference in access to telecommunications between those living in metropolitan and non-metropolitan regions," the report's findings stated.

Stanton said the results are helping provide a baseline understanding of what's happening with Australian telecom and what needs to happen.

"We are still seeing too many customers receiving higher than expected bills during the course of a six month period," he said. "I believe we will see further improvements on this front through the wider application of spend management tools and higher customer awareness of those tools."

For more:
- see this press release

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