Dan Warne14 February 2008, 5:59 AM
Cut-price ISP Dodo, the subject of ongoing controversy over customer service and billing issues, has been directed to clean up its act by the Australian Communications and Media Authority.
Bargain-basement ISP Dodo, the subject of ongoing controversy over customer service and billing issues, has been directed to clean up its act by the Australian Communications and Media Authority.
The communications regulator told Dodo it must comply with industry codes of practice relating to complaints handling and billing.
The ACMA investigated Dodo after a formal request by the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman, which had been receiving swelling numbers of complaints from furious customers who were unable to contact Dodo's customer service staff over technical faults and billing errors.
ACMA said if Dodo did not start complying, it faces civil penalties, such as financial damages in a possible customer class action.
ACMA said Dodo had contravened the industry codes due to failures in its policies and procedures. Its enforcement action has been in train since September 2007, however ACMA was unable to make an amicable arrangement with Dodo. ACMA says it was forced to move to enforcement proceedings against Dodo in December.
Dodo appealed the enforcement and ACMA re-affirmed that enforcement would go ahead in January 2008.
Dodo has been a regular in APC's online news:
- In June last year, it launched "free broadband !". The only catch: you had to pay $32.90 line rental fee, and once you used the broadband at full speed for more than 50 seconds, you could be hit with another fee of up to $29.00, and soon after, your broadband speed would drop to dial-up speeds.
- In November last year, we reported on the tsunami of customer rage against Dodo, with 6,056 complaints about Dodo to the TIO -- almost double the 3,341 complaints made about Telstra BigPond (despite BigPond's massively bigger customer-base).
In the most recent results issued by broadband community Whirlpool.net.au, the company scored worst on customer service, with 53% of people saying they had to wait 20 minutes or longer to get a person on the phone.
Furthermore, 61.5% of people surveyed said Dodo's customer service was "below average" or "awful". Another 45% of people said they'd previously left Dodo because of poor customer service, while 32% said it was because of poor network reliability.