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Research · Customer understanding

What Australians do after a bad service experience, and what complaint data hides

By BREME · · 6 minute read

In short

Australian evidence shows a bad experience rarely turns into a complaint an organisation can count. In research for the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman, 46% of Australians with a telco problem did not complain, often because they thought it would not help. Of the complaints telcos do receive, about 7% reach the ombudsman. The complaints that do surface cluster around waiting, billing and claims. A falling complaint count can mean customers have stopped bothering, not that service improved.

Who this is for: CX leads, complaints and operations managers, and executives in telcos, utilities, insurers, membership bodies, multi-site clinics and subscription brands who report complaint numbers to a board or leadership team.

The gap between a problem and a complaint

Most organisations know how many complaints they received last quarter. Very few know how many customers had a problem and said nothing. The best recent Australian evidence on that gap comes from telecommunications, where the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO) partnered with the Consumer Policy Research Centre (CPRC) on research published in July 2024.

It found that 55% of Australians had encountered at least one telco service challenge in the past year. CHOICE, reporting on the research, noted this was up from 41% in 2021.

Of the people who had a problem, 46% did not lodge a complaint. According to the CPRC, 40% of the complaints that were never made went unmade because the person believed it would not help. CHOICE reports that most people who stayed silent said the process would be overwhelming or would not make a difference.

CHOICE quoted Ombudsman Cynthia Gebert saying too many people are reluctant to complain "because they don't believe it will help". Few people go further, either. CHOICE reports that 10% took their complaints to the TIO, and only 9% could name the TIO without being prompted.

Then the funnel narrows again

Complaints that are made mostly stay with the organisation. The ACMA's telco complaints report for 2025-26, which covers 40 medium to large telcos, recorded 748,501 complaints to providers, a fall of 10.8% on the year before. The proportion escalated to the TIO rose to 6.9%, up from 6.6% in 2024-25. Telcos took an average of 5.4 days to resolve a complaint, down from 5.9 days.

The TIO itself reported that more than 53,000 people came to it for help in 2025-26.

These datasets measure different things and cannot be added together. Read side by side, they describe a funnel. At the bottom is the small number of disputes an ombudsman sees. Above that is a far larger body of complaints the organisation handled itself. And above that is a large group of customers who had a problem and never raised it at all. Board reports usually show only the bottom two layers.

Where complaints cluster in the journey

Ombudsman data is the most detailed public record of where Australian service journeys break. Across three sectors, the same pattern shows up.

  • Telecommunications. The TIO's 2025-26 annual report says telcos taking too long or failing to act was the most common issue, with 33,165 complaints. Complaints about delays getting services connected rose 10.2% to 4,719. Inadequate fault testing made up 13.3% of all complaints, at 7,143. Requests for compensation for financial loss rose 60.7% to 2,609.
  • Energy and water. The Energy and Water Ombudsman Victoria (EWOV) reported 23,957 cases in 2025-26, up 23% and the third straight year of growth. Billing complaints rose 22% and made up more than half of all cases. Water complaints rose 51%.
  • Financial services. Preliminary 2025-26 data from the Australian Financial Complaints Authority (AFCA), as reported by Savings.com.au, showed a record 119,949 complaints. The top issues were delays in claim handling, service quality and claim rejection. The most complained about products were personal transaction accounts, motor vehicle insurance and credit cards.

What the pattern tells us

These are rarely first impressions. Complaints gather where a promise is tested: waiting for a connection, a fault to be fixed or a claim to be decided; the bill that arrives and does not match what the customer expected; the moment the customer needs help and cannot get it.

Delay and inaction stand out. In the TIO data, the single biggest driver is not a rude interaction or a faulty product. It is a customer waiting for something to happen, often with no clear owner on the other side. When we map a journey, we look hard at those waiting stages, because they tend to fall between teams and nobody sees the whole wait.

Endings and money matter too. Billing dominates EWOV's cases and claims dominate AFCA's. Both are moments of high stakes, where the customer finds out whether the relationship is worth what they pay.

What the data does not show

None of these sources measures how many silent customers then left. The TIO and CPRC research counts who complained, not who switched. Ombudsman figures only count people who escalated. So the published Australian evidence we found does not put a number on silent switching, and we would be cautious about any figure that does not show its study.

The strongest public data also comes from sectors with an ombudsman: telecommunications, energy, water and financial services. Clinics, membership bodies, professional services firms and most retailers have no equivalent public count. If you work in one of those sectors, your own complaint data is the only record you have, and if the telco pattern holds in your sector, it may be missing a large share of the problems.

What the evidence does support is narrower but still useful. A large share of people with a problem do not complain. A common reason is a sense that it will not change anything. And complaint volumes are shaped by how easy it is to complain and how much faith customers have in the process, as well as by how many problems there are.

Why a low complaint count is not good news on its own

The 2025-26 telco figures show why. Complaints to telcos fell by 10.8%, yet the share escalated to the ombudsman went up. The TIO welcomed the fall in its own numbers but warned there was no room for complacency, pointing to declining trust in the sector.

A falling count can mean fewer problems. It can also mean complaining has become harder, customers have decided it is pointless, or they have already gone. On a dashboard, all four look the same. That is why we never read complaint volume alone. We put it beside these signals:

  • Repeat contacts about the same issue within a few weeks, which show problems that were closed but not fixed.
  • Escalation rate: the share of complaints that reach a senior manager, a regulator or an ombudsman.
  • How long customers wait before anyone acts, not just how long a complaint takes to close.
  • Quiet exits: cancellations, non-renewals or lapsed memberships with no contact in the months before.
  • The effort it takes to complain. Count the clicks from your home page to a complaints form, and try calling during a busy hour.

What we would do with this

Start by tagging the last six months of complaints, emails and call notes to journey stages, not to teams. Put them on the journey map. Expect them to cluster where customers are waiting, paying or claiming, and check whether anyone owns those stages end to end.

Then go looking for the silent group. Short conversations with customers who cancelled or did not renew, without a retention offer attached, will usually surface problems that never reached the complaints register.

Finally, work on the reason people stay quiet. If customers believe a complaint will not help, show them it does. Tell them what changed because someone spoke up, and make the complaints channel easy to find at the stages where problems are most likely, such as connection, the first bill or a claim.

Sources

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