So the first Quarterly Report from the Telecommunication Dispute Resolution scheme arrived in the mail today and I immediately had a look to see how many people complained. Given that TUANZ is often a port of call for desperate users, I was a little surprised to see that between December 2007 and March 2008 only 275 complaints had been received, and of these only 182 were relevant to telcos (what were the other 93 calling about?).
Of these, just five complaints have progressed to the negotiation stage and one to the conciliation stage and none to the highest level – adjudication.
And yet during that time, the scheme cost $98,205. Of that, $9,729 were “user pays fees”, and the remaining $88,476 were overhead costs paid for by the 16 members of the scheme.
Now given that there is over 100% mobile penetration in this country of 4.26 million people, that Statistics NZ surveys show there are over 1.5 million internet subscribers, and when you consider that at TUANZ we receive on average 15 phone calls or emails complaining about telecommunications services every week, could I perhaps suggest that the number of complaints is a little on the low side. Which leads me to wonder if telco customers know they have this resource available to them?
Because seems to me after reading this report that either the TDR has a visibility issue or this really is a nation of satisfied telecommunication users.