Air New Zealand’s Manila contract: Auckland contact centre firm asks why not keep it local?

The head of an Auckland-based contact centre company says it could easily do the work Air New Zealand is contracting a Philippines firm to do.

Telnet has done work for Lotto, Z, Caltex and Vector and its chief executive John Chetwynd says he’s disappointed the national carrier is taking some work offshore to Manila.

From early next year Air NZ will use up to 100 staff of West Australia-founded firm TSA, to handle online, email and social media inquiries. The airline has struggled to cope with the volume and complexity of inquiries from passengers, pushing wait times out to hours at times and sparking anger from frustrated passengers.

It stresses that the most difficult problems and all voice calls will be dealt with by more than 500 of its own and contract staff in this country and the move is not about money.

Chetwynd said New Zealand’s call centre industry has more than enough capability to handle the complex requirements of companies like Air New Zealand.

“There’s plenty of capability in New Zealand and particularly with the remote working, and the other thing our broadband infrastructure is some of the best in the world.”

His firm employed people and trained them in exactly the same way as Air New Zealand is going to do with the Manila business. But those working there would be paid a fraction of the $25 to $26 an hour many frontline contact centre staff here were.

“It’s just the same process you go through, the same process of onboarding and training. I’m just saying, I’m sure New Zealanders would rather deal with New Zealanders.”

Writing for the company’s blog he said people who ignore history’s lessons often make the same old mistakes, and right now, some New Zealand businesses appear to be making this very error.

“They appear determined once again to test contact centre credo that a New Zealander responding to New Zealand queries is always going to deliver a better response,” he said.

With the rise in local pay rates it was an “understandable move”, however it is not that many years ago that offshoring labour-intensive work was very common in New Zealand.

The trends reversed as companies received a growing backlash from New Zealand customers not satisfied with the service they were receiving. The common problems with offshoring were language barriers and the need to escalate more complex queries back to New Zealand staff, resulting in customers having to explain their problem multiple times.

In the past 12 months Telnet has integrated its cloud-based call management platform, ContactSuite with Amazon Connect, the global omni-channel contact centre platform.

But Air NZ says the move is not about saving money, and it is still looking to employ people for contact centre work in this country.

“Going to the Philippines was not about money. This sort of work is complex and requires a very specific skill set. Not all providers are suitable,” said a spokeswoman.

“Given that, we engaged in an invitation-only RFP (request for proposal) with four suppliers who we knew had the specific skill sets we were looking for.”

Many of the contact centre workers, employed by the airline or local provider Concentrix, did work remotely.