Telstra chief executive Andrew Penn. Picture: Stuart McEvoy
Telstra is sending more jobs to The Philippines, with the telco taking an axe to its contact centre and Telstra Business units.
CPSU spokeswoman Teresa Davison told The Weekend Australian there was still some confusion over how many jobs Telstra may end up shedding.
“I don’t think there’s a lot of co-ordination inside Telstra, and no one knows how the different units work with each other,” Ms Davison said.
Telstra maintains the cuts are necessary to remove back-office duplication and improve customer experience.
But Ms Davison said Telstra customers would be justified in asking how moving jobs overseas would improve service.
A Telstra spokesman said the streamlining of back-office functions and the resultant job cuts were a reflection of how customers were interacting with the telco. “With 50 per cent of our customers engaging with us online, some functions are increasingly no longer required,” he said. “You no longer need to ring a call centre to pay your bill or check how much data you have already used.”
The bulk of the jobs axed are from Telstra’s Perth and Melbourne customer service centres, and come less than a week after the telco’s network suffered its seventh outage in five months.
While the disruption was localised to Victoria it was severe enough to disrupt the operations of a number of Telstra’s business customers on the last day of the financial year.
The cuts also come at a time when overall customer satisfaction with the telco is on the nose.
In May, Telstra chief executive Andrew Penn said the telco was unlikely to meet its full-year NPS target of +12, and said staff bonus incentives, which are tied to customer satisfaction levels, would suffer as a result.
“For employees in our network services business unit (NSBU), it is a similar situation, with the April result down two points from March to -6,” Mr Penn said.
“It is also therefore likely that all of us eligible for the Telstra or NSBU short-term incentive or annual bonus schemes will not receive the NPS-based component of our plans.”
NPS is an established measure of customer loyalty.
source:theaustralian.com.au
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