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bjbj (Intro Chimes) It's not simply a case of damage avoidance, but it's a case of developing
your business and it is sometimes forgotten again companies develop these systems. So
that's the internal side. Let's have a brief look at the external side. Again, the principles,
I think, should be fairly familiar to everybody. And I don't think that they're terribly controversial.
If you're going to have an external system, you want one which is accessible for people.
And you want one which supports the consumer. You want it to be fair. You want it to be
effective. You want it to give appropriate redress. Needs to be independent of the industry
and it needs to be accountable for its actions. And I'm not actually going to stand up here
and pretend that the UK system is a marvellous model which should be adopted, because it
clearly isn't. Although UK telecoms companies are obliged to sign up to an external complaint
handler, the legislation is drafted on the basis of the - frankly, rather dumb idea - that
it would be a good idea to have competition in complaints handling systems! LAUGHTER So
we have the Office of Telecommunications Ombudsman, or TELO, and we have the Communication and
Internet Services Arbitration scheme or CISA. And the industry is slit between the two.
I think TELO have more in terms of numbers. But one of the consequences of this, of course,
is that people go to the wrong scheme, and if you look at both the reports of both of
the schemes, there's a steady and significant group of consumers who have ended up at the
wrong place and have to be referred to the other one. Whether they get there, we don't
know. There is also a problem in relation to the U K schemes about awareness, because
the level of awareness of both OTELO and CISA is quite low. No more than 10% of the consumer
survey has any spontaneous awareness of the bodies. So there's a problem there. In terms
of consumer support and fairness, these schemes do reasonably well. They're helpful. They're
clearly objective. And like the TIO, they can provide appropriate redress. They can
provide compensation to consumers, albeit on modest levels. In terms of effectiveness,
there are some issues here, in particular in the UK, there isn't an equivalent to the
mechanism that the TIO has for systemic complaints for OTELO or CISA. Although they do talk about
important general issues, but there's no mechanism for feeding them into the regulator. Within
the financial services area that's developed this much better - it where there's a much
more formal relationship between the financial ombudsman service and the regulator there.
Currently the financial services authority, but this will change, whereby complaints which
raise important matters of principle can be taken up by the regulator. What struck me,
looking at the TIO's report, is that there's quite a lot of investigations of systemic
issues in TIO, reported by the TIO. And rather more than I thought there would be. It's not
clear that having investigated and identified the systemic issue, this seems to be necessarily
have been cleared up. So that's really a question that I've got. In terms of independence, I
think all the schemes clearly are independent of the industry, in terms of accountability,
I think again the UK schemes aren't quite as good as TIO because we don't have, in the
UK, the level of publicity about complaints relating to individual companies. We don't
get disaggregated data about how companies are doing. It's clear that some companies
are better at complaint handling than others, but we don't know who they are. And although
the data here in Australia is, I think, relatively simple. It's the first step on the way to
seeing who is better and who is worse at complaint handling. So that's the sort of principles.
A few brief conclusions, then. I think the evidence suggests that complaint handling
by telecoms companies, both here and in the UK, has been pretty ineffective. The headlines
in this country really tell their own story. The only area I've seen anything like this
number in the UK is in the financial services and that's a much bigger industry, with a
bigger population and one where there's been lots of problems over recent years. And I
think it is probably fair to say that this is, for me, a failure of the industry here
to meet the expectations of consumers. And the systems have been set up, both here and
in the UK, largely self regulatory systems, although there's an element of oversight and
approval by regulators in both set-ups. It seems to me, looking at the Australian system,
that there's probably a need to rethink the regulatory arrangements, because in some way,
I find it quite paradoxical - I find the evidence in relation to Australia quite paradoxical,
because if I look at the code of practice of the communications alliance, what the code
says seems to be reasonable. There seems to be a range of rules and things, and then you
look at what seems to be happening, and you do wonder whether the telecoms companies are
actually doing what the code says they ought to do. And that suggests to me that there
needs to be better incentives for the companies to comply with the code. I wonder, for example,
whether the TIO is charging enough money per case? You know, that's an incentive not to
let a case get to the TIO. Most of the cases, as I understand it, the TIO deals with, are
ones that are relatively simple which are sent back to the company for resolution. What
is call ed category one cases and you wonder whether there's enough incentive on the companies
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