Telstra’s Andy Penn bringing call centres back to Australia

Telstra is planning to have all its consumer and small business calls answered within Australia within the next 18 months.

Telstra CEO Andy Penn at their HQ in Melbourne. Picture: Aaron Francis/The Australian

Telstra is planning to have all its consumer and small business calls answered within Australia within the next 18 months, chief executive Andy Penn said in a keynote speech to the Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA).

The shift comes as Telstra is also moving to becoming “location agnostic” for its office workers and call centre staff, allowing them to work from home or from any location.

In an address to CEDA on Thursday, Mr Penn said that Telstra already answered 65 per cent of its calls within Australia at the moment allowing all of its call centre consultants to work from home if they wanted to.

He said the shift to bringing the call centres back onshore had also been assisted by the fact that the total number of calls Telstra had been getting had fallen from 50 million a year in 2016 to only 15 million a year now.

“We have reduced the volume of calls by eliminating a lot of the annoyances that people would have had,” he said.

“We are helping people get more out of the technology rather than reporting a fault.

“This has given us the opportunity to move all of our call centre staff onshore. We will have this completed within the next 18 months.”

Mr Penn’s comments come after some Australian companies which relied heavily on offshore call centres found themselves hit by the fallout from Covid when offshore call centres closed or were disrupted as they had to move their own staff to working from home.

Mr Penn said about 80 per cent of Telstra’s call centre workers in Australia currently worked from home on any given day, with all of them being allowed to if they wanted.

He said Telstra was moving to having a “location agnostic” approach for all its office and call centre staff to open “the talent pool beyond the typical CBD with a hybrid of digital and physical tools and spaces tailored to specific roles, preferences and needs”.

He said employers needed to realise that they would have to offer more flexible work opportunities including more remote and hybrid working conditions in competing for talented staff.

“The bottom line is competition for talent is going to shift to the new era of remote and hybrid work because where an employee lives is no longer a limitation,” he said.

“Our future ways of working are going to be instrumental in how successful we will be in this war for talent.

“The companies that get it right will attract and keep the best talent and talent is the single most important competitive differentiator in uncertain times.”

Mr Penn said people needed to realise that people’s personal and working life would never return to how it was before Covid.

“There is every chance that 2021 will be even more uncertain than 2020,” he said.

“There seems to be a strong desire for things to return to normal.

“As humans we like structure in our lives… It’s natural to wish for the world around us to feel normal.

“But this is wrong thinking as it will never return to normal.”

“How we work, how we travel and how we live generally will not look and feel the same as it did 12 months ago.”

“It is therefore better to spend our energy in accepting the changes that need to come and embrace a new way of living and working.”