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Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce has said call wait times for its customer service line are now better than before COVID.
Speaking on 2GB radio on Friday, he claimed the average time to be put through to an operator had dropped to just three minutes, which he claimed was the best in the business’ history.
“We believe that the call centre now is fixed,” Joyce said.
It comes after the airline made international news when one passenger was placed on hold for eight hours back in April.
“Some people were waiting well over five hours,” admitted Joyce. “But back in April, our volumes were up two to three times the amounts they were before COVID.
“That was no excuse. We should have been able to meet that because we had people who were concerned about travelling.
“So we trained people up in the call centres. We now have nearly two times the amount of people we had before COVID. We’ll get to three times. And this week, compared to the two hours average wait time, it was down to six minutes. Yesterday was the best we’ve had in our history at three minutes.
“And nobody waited over 20 minutes yesterday, so it’s a big improvement … It’s better than it was before COVID.”
Australian Aviation previously reported how Qantas claimed to have hired an extra 750 staff in the last year to manage the phone lines.
The airline said the root cause of previous delays stemmed from a combination of flying returning following COVID and customers confused as to how to spend their accrued flight credits.
“No airline’s contact centres were designed to be able to manage the record number of calls and complexity of queries for COVID-era travel, particularly when international travel is involved,” said Qantas in April.
“Our call volume has increased from an average of 7,500 calls a day to 14,000 calls a day, with calls on average taking 50 per cent longer to resolve than pre-COVID given the complexity of some itineraries across more than one airline where routes are reopening, and flights are restarting at different times.”
It came after a caller to Sydney’s 2GB radio station said she was on hold for eight hours and 39 minutes and showed the presenter her mobile phone’s call log.
“I took the call to a meeting, I took the call to an eatery,” Katrina said. “It was a two-hour meeting, and we had the music playing in the background the whole time.”
Australian Aviation was reporting long wait times on Qantas’ customer service line all the way back in March 2020.
Lindsay
says:QANTAS closed its’ Call Centres’ in BNE, & MEL, within the last ten years’.
That’s nearly 1000 well trained staff gone, some of whom had been with the carrier for decades’.
You can’t ‘buy’ that sort of experience, & huge knowledge base.
Now they’ve got HBA, AKL, MNL & CPT only, looking after Australia, the Americas’, Asia, South Africa & Europe, in list order.
No wonder the wait time for callers’ got to be hours’ long.
Hopefully Mr Joyce is correct in what he says, & that more staff are being employed, & trained.
BTW, the person who was responsible for closing those two huge Call Centres’ in Oz, left the Company soon after that disgusting, wrong decision, went elsewhere, leaving a mess behind, & many very dedicated staff jobless.
Alan Joyce & the Board have much to answer for in ‘signing off’ that decision.
Let’s see how long it takes the ‘wheel to turn’, & QANTAS re-establishes a call centre in MEL or BNE again.
Kelli
says:This is not true, I waited 45 minutes yesterday and then it took the staff member 65 minutes to resolve my enquiry. This was made up of waiting to get someone to assist her as she did not know how to resolve the issue.
Brian Beban
says:“I’m sorry” is too late. As well, I’m down $1000 on my refund due to Qantas being inflexible with their conditions, regardless of the pandemic causing my cancellation in February. I spent 2.5 hrs on the phone and then had to wait for 5 weeks to get my refund after my cancellation refund was illegally transferred to a credit as my ticket conditions specified. As well, the Credit had an expiry date and if it had been allowed to expire, I would have forfeited the credit of $9,000. Never again Qantas.