EXCLUSIVE | Most Qantas customers who’ve tried to contact the airline’s call centre in recent months will be aware that it has major problems. Apart from the long wait times often running into hours, nearly everyone who doesn’t have Qantas Platinum or Platinum one status is having their calls redirected to one of Qantas’ outsourced call centres in Cape Town or Suva – where the staff are so poorly trained that they could accidentally cancel your confirmed booking!
Qantas has publicly acknowledged that this situation is unacceptable and promised to improve its customer service. There has now been some progress on this, although it sadly doesn’t appear to involve the expansion of its excellent Hobart call centre.
Qantas currently operates call centres that take calls from the public in Hobart and Auckland. Its other existing call centres in Cape Town and Suva – the latter of which opened earlier this year – are operated by a third party called Mindpearl.
Qantas is currently hiring and training more staff at its Auckland call centre – which is good news as this location is widely regarded as providing good service. The airline has also just re-established a call centre in Manila to provide additional customer support. This new call centre is not operated by Mindpearl.
The new Qantas call centre in Manila opened in May 2022 and will handle reservations and ticketing requests. It’s now slowly being integrated into the network of Qantas contact centres as more staff are trained.
Qantas already uses call centres in the Philippines for Qantas Frequent Flyer Service Centre, Qantas Business Rewards and Qantas Money enquiries. Qantas did previously also have staff in the Philippines handing reservations enquiries several years ago, but had stopped using that call centre before the pandemic.
Virgin Australia and Jetstar’s main call centres are also in the Philippines, while Virgin also has a small call centre in Brisbane. There have been virtually no complaints about the call centres of either airline in recent years, as calls are answered quickly by competent, highly-trained staff.
It’s not yet clear whether the new Qantas reservations staff in Manila will result in improved customer service. But this could be good news if Qantas puts in the effort to train its new Manila-based staff properly, providing them with the resources they need and empowering them to take ownership of customer problems – something which evidently hasn’t been the case with the Mindpearl-operated call centres.
At least one AFF member has already been connected to the new Manila-based reservations call centre and had a good experience.
Qantas Chief Customer Officer Stephanie Tully has claimed that the company uses overseas call centres so it can “follow the sun”, providing a 24/7 service to international customers. But it has clearly been a cost-cutting exercise as most Qantas customers are now being put through to overseas call centres even during Australian business hours – when it would be the middle of the night in South Africa.
Qantas says that its call centres are the only part of its business that grew during the pandemic, with more staff now answering phones than before COVID-19. (Unfortunately, raw staff numbers alone don’t tell the full picture as almost all of these new staff are overseas and overall customer service has got much worse over the same period.)
The airline says it will continue to recruit and train more people for its call centres each month, with a focus on airline-trained staff.
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