The QANTAS call centre in Melbourne, one of three operating in Australia, will formally close today 16 June 2015. The call centre in Brisbane is scheduled to close sometime in mid 2016. Hobart will be the sole call centre located in Australia for the airline.
The closure of the Melbourne call centre which employs around 250 staff and located in Camberwell will represent the loss of around 580 years of combined collective experience. A dedicated “Premium Desk” offered to top tier frequent flyers was also located at Camberwell office. Staff have either been offered redundancy packages or given the option to transfer to Hobart.
The closure of the Brisbane and Melbourne call centres were first flagged in May 2014 as part of the airline’s program to reduce costs by $2 billion including the slashing of up to 5000 jobs across the airline. Cost inefficiencies were cited as maintaining three separate call centres across three states.
Apart from its Australian call centres, QANTAS has a centre with Auckland based staff. The airline also outsourced since 2013 some of its call centre functions to South African based call centre company Mindpearl. Under the revised distribution of calls, only QANTAS Silver Status members and above will have access to the Australian call centre, with all other calls and overflow being handled by Auckland. The South African centre will handle European calls from the UK, France, German and Italian markets. There are limitations to what the South African centre can action in terms of bookings with more complex transactions needing to be referred to Auckland or Australia.
Whilst a reduction or consolidation in terms of human resource can often lead to economic benefits and savings for any organisation including airlines, these may in fact be short term. Long term outlook of such drastic measures as the ones adopted by QANTAS may prove costly, particularly when it comes to the experience offered by long term staff. Once an experience human resource is gone it usually irreplaceable thus outweighing and eliminating any initial cost saving.
