Last week, Australian Frequent Flyer exposed the dire state of the service being provided by the Qantas call centre. Many customers are waiting hours on hold, only to speak to staff who can’t assist with even basic requests – or for their calls to be disconnected.
Clearly, this story has resonated with Australians. Following last Thursday’s article, we’ve received countless messages from fed-up Qantas customers thanking us for drawing attention to the issue and sharing their own terrible experiences with the Qantas call centre.
The problems with the call centre are not new. In fact, they pre-date COVID-19. But the situation is evidently now much worse than Qantas management seems to realise. Put simply, Qantas needs more well-trained staff at its Hobart and Auckland call centres.
In addition to the extraordinarily long wait times, one of the main issues with the Qantas call centre is that so many calls are being answered by staff at the outsourced Cape Town call centre who lack the training or knowledge to be able to assist customers effectively.
Qantas claims that it uses call centres in different time zones to allow it to take customer queries 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Clearly, the decision to expand the use of the Cape Town call centre is also designed to save the airline money.
Wages in South Africa are significantly lower than in Australia or New Zealand. But if it takes considerably more time to resolve customer enquiries, and many aren’t being resolved at all – compelling customers to call a second, third, fourth or even fifth time – how much is really being saved?
A failure to provide basic customer service can also cost the business a lot of money in lost revenue. It’s easy to measure the savings made by outsourcing to an overseas call centre. But how many customers have been unable to book a flight, meaning Qantas has missed out on revenue? And how many customers have been so appalled by the poor service they’ve received that they’ve decided to use a different airline for future bookings, or given up engaging with the Qantas Frequent Flyer program?
These opportunity costs are much harder to measure, but they are not theoretical.
71 hours on hold for a date change that was never resolved
After we published our article last week, many AFF members shared their own nightmare experiences with the Qantas call centre on our dedicated thread.
One of these posts came from AFF member andydj, who shared their experience of trying to change the date on their parents’ international Classic Flight Reward booking. It seems like a simple request, but it couldn’t be done online. So this person and other family members took turns trying to get through to the Qantas call centre. It took 7 days of trying before Qantas even answered the phone!
This member wrote:
Every call to QF call centre was a hold for at least 3 hours, then the call would just be cut.
My parents and my brother who are in Australia, and myself (UK based) took it in turns over a 7 day period to attempt to reach someone.
After a week of trying, andydj got through to an operator at the Cape Town call centre but they were not competent at all.
Finally, on one of my attempts after a 5 hour hold I got through to an agent in Capetown.
She didn’t have a clue how to deal with the issue. There was a dog barking and a baby crying and people laughing and joking in the background.
I talked her through it. She repeatedly put me on hold to seek assistance from a supervisor. We found available flights on the chosen date. She made the change, but half way through the call the call cut out and I was taken to a customer experience survey.
After a further 12 attempts to reach an agent, I advised my parents to email QANTAS directly via an email address for a European Qantas office.
They replied almost instantly, with the bad news that the agent hadn’t completed the date change properly and that she had failed to do what was necessary.
In total, this person spent 71 hours on hold with Qantas and still couldn’t get a simple date change on a Classic Flight Reward booking resolved.
After several more attempts, I called QANTAS at 11pm UK time to resolve once and for all. I was “on hold”. I fell asleep. I woke up at 8am the following day (9 hours later) – I was still on hold.
Kept in communication with the European contact we had established via email who couldn’t get into make changes to the booking due to the errors the phone agent had made..
Having now spent 71 hours in total on hold to Qantas.
$350,000 worth of Qantas flights cancelled
So frustrated by this appalling experience, andydj‘s parents cancelled their flight and purchased a new one. The new flights cost more points than originally paid and they are still waiting to get a refund for the original flight.
But this is not the end of this story. So disgusted was this member by the awful customer service from Qantas that they cancelled 48 upcoming London-Sydney flights booked for their business colleagues over the next year in Qantas Business Class, worth nearly AU$350,000.
The flights were rebooked on United Airlines, which answered the phone promptly when andydj tried calling.
As a measure, I decided to phone the United call centre out of curiosity, to ask about one of the flights.
There was one simple set of options to select from, and following my selection, my call was answered after 2 rings, and dealt with thoroughly.
Thank you United for restoring my faith in the airline industry.
Qantas customer service is a national embarassment.
Yes, fixing the Qantas call centre will cost the airline money. But how much money (and customer goodwill) will continue to be lost by not fixing it?
Join the discussion on the Australian Frequent Flyer forum: Qantas Call Centre Long Wait Times
