Coronavirus: Companies taking tech path to future

Australian companies are fast-tracking reforms of their support services and recruiting thousands of local workers to combat offshore call centre lockdowns.

Former Business Council of Australia president and the Abbott government’s national commission of audit chair Tony Shepherd. Picture: Christian Gilles

Australian companies are fast-tracking reforms of their support services and recruiting thousands of local workers to combat offshore call centre lockdowns, amid calls for greater “investment and innovation” to streamline customer contact.

The COVID-19 outbreak has triggered a mass shift in the approach of Australian businesses to send customer and technical support overseas, with a renewed push to modernise services through greater integration of artificial intelligence and data centralisation.

Tony Shepherd, a former Business Council of Australia president and chair of the Abbott government’s national commission of audit, said the pandemic was a “wake-up call” for companies who had become complacent and fallen behind the rest of the world in investment and innovation. “This is another wake-up call … don’t accept the status quo … we have great technology providers based here,” Mr Shepherd said.

“This (coronavirus) is going to force companies in Australia who have been slow to invest and innovate to ask how we can use digital technology, like AI, so we provide more efficient customer service … it’s not an unreasonable expectation in 2020.”

With call centres in The Philippines and India expected to be impacted by lockdowns for at least another two weeks, major Australian companies have been forced to ramp up local call centre capacity and support working-from-home staffing measures.

The Morrison government had been informed of vulnerabilities facing some companies earlier in the COVID-19 pandemic, where distressed customers were being urged to make online inquiries or wait to be called back.

Major telcos, banks and energy companies, including Telstra, Optus and Origin, are now accelerating AI projects and programs to streamline customer services. Strategies being adopted or considered to future-proof customer service responses include enhanced automated systems, improving centralised databases and allowing customers to do more online.

Optus has shifted some call centre workers in The Philippines and India to working from home and have hired more than 500 Australians, and retrained more than 1600 staff, to ramp up domestic customer service capacity.

Telstra chief executive Andy Penn is pushing to accelerate the use of AI in support of their target to eliminate two-thirds of customer service calls by 2022. Both Optus and Telstra are aggressively pursuing AI options, including using chat bots and user guides, to improve customer support.

Telstra last month said it was bringing on an additional 3500 staff to bolster its domestic ­operations. A Telstra spokesman said the impact of COVID-19 on businesses and the community had been “extensive and has posed challenges for many businesses when it comes to serving ­customers”.

“This has been apparent for Telstra due to impacts on our contact centres in The Philippines and India,” the spokesman said.

“We are managing this so we can be there for our customers when they need us and keep them connected during this unprecedented time.

“This includes expanding our team by bringing on thousands of temporary roles in Australia and also using the opportunity to increase the use of self-service and online tools so our customers have greater flexibility in how they interact with us.”

The spokesman said Telstra was “carefully considering our customer support model post-COVID-19”.

Mr Shepherd said in the short term operations were likely to shift back to Australia at higher cost, citing The Philippines and South Africa as countries where businesses had outsourced customer services centres.

He said the jobs boom delivered by building up the domestic call centre capacity would be a “welcome relief for a lot of people who otherwise will be on JobKeeper and JobSeeker”.

Australian Services Union assistant national secretary Linda White said “rebuilding the capacity of our local call centres is a very good thing for Australian jobs and the economy”.