CBA reaches out for call centre staff from Qantas, Virgin as coronavirus hardship demand rises

CBA and ANZ are preparing to add call centre staff, amid expectations the deluge of requests for repayments relief will continue.

Commonwealth Bank has suffered a major outage, leaving many Central Queenslanders stranded.

Commonwealth Bank has granted more than 15,000 home loan deferral payment requests since announcing its relief program on Friday, as customers inundate the bank with requests for help.

Chief executive Matt Comyn said the bank receives around 100 deferral requests on a normal day.

“We’ve received and granted more than 15,000 home loan deferral payments,” Mr Comyn told ABC TV on Tuesday night, adding the bank would consider expanding its freeze on home loan payments to credit cards.

Commonwealth Bank is in talks with Qantas and Virgin Australia to have some of their call centre staff assist the bank with the surge in volumes, as the head of its retail division urged people to submit requests online rather than over the phone.

CBA group executive for retail Angus Sullivan said the bank was still preparing for “large volumes” of hardship enquiries in the immediate near future.

“For customers who feel comfortable accessing support via digital processes, that gives us a huge opportunity to be able to get a head start on the workload versus customers calling us,” Mr Sullivan said.

Meanwhile, ANZ Bank chief executive Shayne Elliott said the dimensions of the coronavirus pandemic were mostly known, making it easier to plan an economic response.

In a LinkedIn broadcast to staff on Tuesday, Mr Elliott said there were a lot of unknowns associated with the global financial crisis.

“But you can put a time frame on this,” he said in a Q&A session with the bank’s head of retail, Kath Bray. “I can (put a) dimension on the risk.”

Like ANZ’s rivals, Ms Bray said the bank was preparing to close some of its branches, as parents had to stay at home with their children and governments prepared to take more assertive measures to limit the number of public spaces.

She also encouraged customers to use digital channels.

Ms Bray said about 150 bankers had been reassigned to handle hardship cases.

The number of people inquiring about relief packages was “massively higher”, according to Mr Elliott.

While ANZ would inevitably struggle with the scale of what was being asked of the bank, he said customers should have no fear of missing out or the imposition of a value limit.

“All we ask for is people’s patience,” the ANZ chief said. “There’s no shame in taking advantage of the available packages.

“I’d grab the opportunities with both hands.”

Mr Elliott said there had been a 50-fold increase in the number of people seeking information about the packages for households and businesses compared with other bank announcements.

Meanwhile, CBA’s Mr Sullivan said the bank was looking at moving some of its branch staff into the call centres, as well as reaching out to Qantas and Virgin Australia for additional call centre staff.

Its collections and hardship team had a headcount of 800-900, and it was looking at bringing on additional staff “easily in the hundreds”, Mr Sullivan said.

“Not all of those would come externally. Obviously, if there are folks in our branch network who have the relevant skills that we can put on the phone tomorrow, as we see how demand or our customer foot traffic plays out in that branch network, we also want to make sure that we can support our customers as quickly as possible,” he said.

While the bank was expecting the surge in hardship inquiries to continue, Mr Sullivan said it was hard to form a view about how it would play out.

“Our focus right now is making sure that we resource up as much as we possibly can so that when people contact us, we can offer them great service and help them,” he said.

“We’re just going to have to play it by ear and see how it works out over the next week or two. In particular, the huge amount of government stimulus coming into the system should provide some counterbalance to the strain that folks are under. So, that’ll be probably one of the next big touch points for us to see how things are progressing.”

Mr Sullivan said CBA was managing developments closely to make sure that it was supporting the economy while also keeping the bank prudentially safe.

Additional reporting: Angelica Snowden.