TIO is the Australian Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman in charge of resolving complaints made by small businesses and residential subscribers against their telephone or Internet service.

In his blog, Tony Poulos summarizes many interesting facts from TIO’s last report. I highly recommend that RA practitioners everywhere read the full report.

I have always considered customer complaints a goldmine of information for RA. As TIO reports show, customer complaints are not just an information source, but also a cost leakage, that should be prevented. 

Allow me to explain.
TIO charges the service providers according to the number and type of complaints made against them. The cost per complaint ranges from $60 to $5200 depending on the severity of the complaint.  From July 2008 to July 2009, TIO handled 230,065 complaints, charging Service Providers $ 23,676,085. TIO accepts a complaint only after the concerned service provider has had the opportunity to resolve it. The astonishing fact is that 90% of all complaints, some 208,000, were resolved with a referral back to the service provider. These 90% of complaints represent a sum of approximately $21MIn other words, had the service providers resolved these justified complaints, when they had received them the first time, they would have received up to 90% fewer complaints via TIO, saving 90% of the fees they paid to TIO, plus the cost of internally re-handling the complaint when submitted by TIO.

So correctly handling the complaint the first time is a clear issue of Cost Assurance that can show its direct $ value, not to mention the improvement in customer satisfaction, and other indirect impacts. Yet the complaints amount increased from 2007/8 to 2008/9 by 54%; go figure.