KEY POINTS:
Trying to fill staff vacancies in its call centres has taken Vodafone halfway around the world to Egypt.
Starting next month, some of 200,000 calls from Vodafone prepay customers will be answered in Cairo - 16,500 kilometres from Vodafone's Auckland call centres.
Customer care director Andrea Midgen said a 35 per cent increase in calls into Vodafone's call centres over the past year had sent her searching for new staff.
"Earlier this year we were failing our service levels and therefore failing our customers, simply because we couldn't get enough staff," said Midgen.
Initially Midgen investigated New Zealand cities outside Auckland to locate a new call centre but was unable to find a site that had the facilities, infrastructure and population for staffing.
She said any New Zealand city that had the ingredients already had call centres soaking up the workforce.
She widened her search to Australia but found the same problems but discovered that Australia was putting some calls to Vodafone Egypt.
She said the attraction of sending calls to Cairo was a large, educated population base with a high standard of English language skills.
Vodafone Egypt handles calls from Vodafone Group's multinational clients and Vodafone Australia, as well as 12 million local mobile customers.
"It's not about making people redundant, it's not about people losing jobs, it's just giving us that capacity to be able to deliver to our customers," said Midgen.
In New Zealand for training are five of the 32 young Egyptians who successfully made it through a recruitment process that attracted 1100 applications from Vodafone Egypt staff.
Egyptian recruit Michael Adly described it as "Vodafone Idol".
They are spending five weeks on the same training course used for New Zealand-based call centre staff and getting a feel for the country.
Networking
* Calls to Vodafone may be answered by staff at Vodafone Egypt's Cairo call centre.
* Vodafone said the move came after the company was unable to recruit enough staff in New Zealand.
* No New Zealand job losses are expected as part of the change.
* Telecom recently transferred 85 jobs from call centre operator TeleTech's Newmarket operation to Manila.
