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Complaint Procedure

The Office of Telecommunications & Regulatory Affairs strives to mediate cable complaints to the subscriber's satisfaction in a timely fashion. There is a wide range of cable complaints that include getting cable buried, periodical outages, programming changes, billing discrepancies, changes in rates or the inability to reach the cable operator.

When a cable customer contacts our office to file a complaint, our staff initially determines if the customer resides within the City of Austin limits, and whether the cable operator has violated Customer Service Standards through a fact-finding process. We also verify if the customer has attempted to remedy the complaint with the cable operator before contacting our office. The normal process is to give the cable operator an opportunity to resolve the complaint before our office gets involved. (see also Customer Service Standards)

If it is determined that the cable operator has violated the CSS, then we write up a complaint form and assign it a complaint number for tracking purposes. The complaint form consists of the customer's name, as it appears on their invoice, address, phone number and description of the complaint. We advise the customer on the process. The complaint is then dated and forwarded to the cable operator. We have an agreed-upon response time of 10 days for the cable operator to respond to customers either by phone or by letter. The cable operator provides our office with copies of response letters. These responses are reviewed and logged into our complaint system.

In a case where the customer is not satisfied with the action taken by the cable operator, the customer is told to contact our office. We then attempt to mediate a resolution, as long as the nature of the complaint is within our purview. Nearly all complaints are resolved to the customer's satisfaction.

In outline form, the process is as follows:

1. Customer contacts TARA (call 974-2999 or file via email)
2. Staff reviews complaint -- some calls referred to cable operator
3. Complaint number assigned/logged in
4. Complaint forwarded to cable operator customer representative
5. Cable operator response (10 days)
6. Close-out with resolution
7. Reported monthly by cable operators and in TARA's monthly complaint summary report