The QANTAS call centre in Brisbane will close today, 13 June 2016, meaning Hobart will be the sole call centre located in Australia for the airline. Approximately 150 remaining staff are affected by this closure when it was flagged.
The closure of the Camberwell based Melbourne call centre occurred on 16 June 2015, employed around 250 staff. It represented 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 were 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.
In addition to Hobart, 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.
The potential economic benefits of consolidating the call centres seems to already be having negative repercussions in terms of service delivery. On the condition of anonimity call centre staff have contacted AHB and advised that wait times of 2 to 3 hours are now common. These are in normal operations – wait times would likely increase in the event there are negative impacts to bookings affected by weather, strikes or management directed groundings. Staff feel overwhelmed and stressed with the sheer volume of calls and inadequate. They feel management simply doesn’t care about their well being nor that of the customer providing unacceptable wait times.
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 experienced human resource is gone it is usually irreplaceable thus outweighing and eliminating any initial cost saving. Long term it is like to have the opposite effect and in hindsight these closures may be considered as very costly errors.
