Qantas call centre staff lying about their real location?

[PERLHR]

The NCL based staff are mostly sales agents now for the likes of BA Holidays. The gold, GGL and YouFirst lines now only go to MAN since about 2019 or2020

Really? I did not know that....mind you it was years ago when I would be regularly on with Newcastle particularly for flight changes/AVIOS bookings etc....thanks for that...

 

[kpc]

There is a reason why Hobart call centre is sought after...nothing about race or discrimination imo.

 

[pagingjoan]

Slightly off-topic, but on a recent call I was supposedly on the VIP line, needing to change a MEL-SYD-SIN-LHR (and return) booking at short notice.
As it appeared that nothing was available for my new dates with the same routing, I commented that I didn't actually need to fly via Sydney, if some other option was available.
The staff member responded:
"Oh, I don't think we fly from Melbourne to the UK. But I could check......."

 

[AuSammy]

I’m bronze and was helping another bronze member mate reorganise and add sectors to their ow J award booking.

Calling on a Sunday lunchtime we were answered by someone with a very very strong islander accent, very polite good english.

Understood what we wanted but said she didn’t have the tools to make some of the changes nor reprice the itinerary herself but there was a backup team that could assist if we didn’t mind hanging on while she organised what we wanted.

We were on the phone for quite some time but she popped back on the call regularly to assure us she was still there and not to worry.

After quite some time she advised it was all done and could we check my mates email account as the repriced reissued tickets should have been delivered.

Sure enough the tickets were there and she waited while we went through and double checked all the details before she left the call.

Wherever she was located I don’t care. Was superb, even if time consuming, service.

 

[clifford]

The NCL based staff are mostly sales agents now for the likes of BA Holidays. The gold, GGL and YouFirst lines now only go to MAN since about 2019 or 2020.

Yes indeed. In recent times I've had several agents there who have been unable to even correctly change the frequent flyer number in my booking.

The last two times I went to the Indian call centre and it was fixed without problem.

 

[anat0l]

I think there is no one of Platinum or above in their lifetime can claim they haven't been at least unconciously racist in this regard.

You call Qantas. You hear an Aussie or native English accent and feel relieved. You hear anything else and you start to dread. Location may not be important at all, but people are curious because they want to feel like the call will be worthwhile, so they go for the easiest indicator first and back it up with subtly integrated questions like asking about the weather outside. (Or for some customers, a not so subtle demand to describe the outside weather and a follow up degrading dress down when the answer is against the weather report)

Notice how people always say that companies like Qantas should have Australian call centres. Not competent ones, Australian ones. There may well be a correlation between the two, but so there.

I'd still be surprised if Qantas advised its agents to lie about their location. Hobartians or any Australian agents have no reason to lie. Since most offshore centres are contracted rather than directly employed by Qantas, it may well be the bosses of those contracted companies who are advising them to lie (rather naively ignoring that it is easy to catch such a lie out).

As for whether it is harassment, well, picking out offshore call centres allows two things: one, it is (usually) cheaper, and two, people generally feel more liberal to insult, slander or be disrespectful (if even subtly or underhandedly) as long as it wasn't to a direct Qantas employee, let alone another Australian.

 

[madrooster]

There may well be a correlation between the two, but so there.

it may well be the bosses of those contracted companies who are advising them to lie (rather naively ignoring that it is easy to catch such a lie out).

I suspect it is a local directive within the centre and I doubt Qantas are the ones stipulating it, otherwise the Fijian and South Africans would be doing it too.

In general though, businesses in Australia first had a fascination with Indian contact centres back in the noughties and into the early 2010s. Many tried the idea and found that the overall feedback was poor. This came about for a few reasons:

1. Indian accents are much more difficult to understand to the average Australian, depending on the region of India
2. Less Indians learn English as a key language
3. Indians in general are less customer service oriented
4. Third party contact centre operators in India tend to have a controlling overlord... where the culture is you must stick to the script and there's punishments for not doing so.
5. There is no autotomy given in such contact centres to think outside the box. Part of this is due to the tight reign by the Australian business and part of it is to do with the local culture / the operator of the contact centre.

The fascination then switched to using a Filipino contact centres. This gave a few improvements...

1. Filipinos speak with an American accent when they speak English which appears to be a lot easier to understand to the average Australian
2. English is far better spoken in the Philippines
3. Filipinos have it a lot more in their culture to be service oriented

Now, where there is some similarity to India is that some of the contact centres in the Philippines are still operated by Indians... with the same overlord culture seen in Indian ones, so the agents still feel a sense of fear in what they do, so there is still a lack of autonomy and service orientation in those centres. The ones which do better are the ones who have been given leeway to get the job done.

Then Australia now has a bit of a fascination with the term near-shoring, which involves the use of Fiji-based contact centres, so now many Australian businesses are now dabbling with contact centres in Suva which has become a bit of a hotspot for contact centres.

Similar issues still exist with the use of Fiji based contact centres... I personally don't think there is a way to completely solve all of the issues.