Everyone has at least one friend they pester for advice based on their profession. My background is in consumer law and policy, so I’ve become the town agony aunt for all consumer related queries. Honestly, I’m just glad I’m not a doctor.
If a friend buys something online and receives something different in the mail, gets into an argument with an airline, or has issues with their utility company, I am the resident brains trust. Here’s some of the advice I give most regularly.
I keep hearing I should change my energy retailer but I’ve been with mine for nearly 20 years and they’ve been great to deal with! What should I do?
It’s great that you’ve had such a positive experience with your retailer; good customer service is valuable. But it’s probably not worth the hundreds of extra dollars a year you’re paying in “loyalty tax”.
When your retail contract with your energy company ends, if you don’t actively seek out an offer, your provider will automatically roll you on to one. Prior to 2019, your retailer could even put you on to a more expensive tariff. Over 20 years, you can see how that adds up!
After a lot of hard work by consumer advocates and a couple of independent reviews, in 2019, in most jurisdictions in Australia, regulators mandated a “default offer” or a fair retail price for energy that retailers are obliged to apply to out-of-contract customer accounts. This means that consumers who are unwilling or unable to engage with the energy market will still be able to access energy at a fair price.
While these default offers are considered “fair”, and are certainly a better alternative to retailers price gouging customers with impunity when their contracts lapse, they aren’t the best price on the market. So cost of loyalty can still add up.
If you’re interested in getting the best available energy price, you should review your plan(s) at least once a year. While I’m not convinced the onus should be on consumers to find the best deal for an essential service (or that essential services should be markets in the first place), there’s little I can do but rant about it.
While I’m busy ranting, you can either call your retailer directly and ask for their best offer in your area (which they are now obliged to disclose) or you can use a comparison site. But when using comparison sites, it’s best to rely on government sites – Energy Made Easy (everywhere but WA, Victoria and the NT) or Victorian Energy Compare in Victoria. These are the only sites where retailers are required to publish all their available offers, and they have no commercial incentives.
Keep in mind that a lot of ‘“cheaper” offers have conditional discounts applied (for instance, signing up for direct debit or paying your bill on time), so make sure you can actually meet those conditions.
I bought a smart watch online. When the watch was delivered, I noticed it was refurbished – not brand new like I expected. When I looked back at the listing I noticed it said that the watch was refurbished and from a third-party seller, but it wasn’t obvious or prominently displayed on the listing. I still want a watch, but I’d prefer a brand new one as it’s a gift. What can I do?
This is an example of a business bending the rules rather than breaking them. Businesses can’t make false or misleading statements about their products, including staying silent on important details. But in this case, while the information you needed may have been buried lower down on the webpage, it was still there and it was a clear and correct description of the product.
You should still contact the business whose website you bought the product from. If you state the misunderstanding and say you’d like to exchange for a brand new watch (and you’re happy to pay the difference, given that the watch was cheaper than new ones typically are), in most cases they’re likely to facilitate this for you. If they don’t want to help, and you bought the watch through a sales aggregator, you can contact the seller directly to see if they’ll be more helpful.
If you can’t get either the website you bought from or the third party seller to help you out, unfortunately you might be stuck with a refurbished watch. You don’t actually have any consumer entitlements for “change of mind”. I don’t think this will be the case, though – anecdotally, when you nicely ask to exchange a small product (especially for a more expensive one), businesses are generally pretty helpful.
I signed up for a mobile phone plan, went overseas and didn’t realise that international roaming was automatically switched on. I didn’t use my phone plan at all overseas, but I was charged a daily fee since my phone wasn’t on airplane mode. I contacted the phone company and they pointed to a clause on page 26 of a 50-page contract stating international roaming would be automatically switched on and that it’s my responsibility to turn it off. No one told me about this at the point of sale. Do I have any rights?
Prepare yourself to kick up a stink about this one. While technically the contract terms were there, you still absolutely have grounds to dispute the charges. In the first instance, you should write to the phone company and tell them that the contract clause is unfair – a reasonable person could not be expected to read 50 pages of fine print, no one flagged this clause with you at the point of sale, and you’ve suffered a loss because of the clause. Let them know that if the issue can’t be resolved, you will lodge a complaint with the telecommunications ombudsman.
Now the phone company knows that you’re not going to back down and that you’ve got a few tools to argue with them. I’m confident that at this stage you’ll probably receive an apology and a full reversal of the charges. But if you don’t get the answer you’re looking for, go ahead and lodge a complaint with the telecommunications ombudsman. They will run an investigation on your behalf.
And next time you’re heading overseas, remember to turn off roaming, switch sim cards or keep your phone on airplane mode.
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