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Primus Australian call centre creates 1000 jobs

By Adam Turner
1 May 2008 01:22PM
Tags: primus | job | call | centre

Primus Telecom has created 1000 local jobs with the launch of a full service call centre in the Melbourne CBD.

The $3.2 million call centre in Flinders Street was officially opened yesterday by Federal Communications Minister, Senator Stephen Conroy.

The 430 seat centre will employ 700 staff directly and another 300 indirectly. The new facility also incorporates a training and development centre.

"This is great news for the local economy with more jobs staying here in Melbourne," Senator Conroy said.

"By investing in Australia’s telecommunications industry, Primus is continuing to play an important role in delivering competition for the benefit of Australian consumers. The Australian Government welcomes investments such as the new Primus call centre in Melbourne."

Bucking the trend to move call centre operations overseas, Primus Telecom CEO Ravi Bhatia said an Australian workforce delivers a superior standard of customer care.

"Almost all of our competitors have moved their call centre jobs and customer support jobs overseas," Bhatia said.

"Primus is one company which has faith in Australia and thinks people in Australia are highly talented and can do a wonderful job and have high productivity levels."

Serving around 500,000 customers, the call centre handles all aspects of customer contact including inbound and outbound sales, service delivery, provisioning, billing, customer care and technical help desk functions.

The opening comes a month after Primus completed a multi- million dollar upgrade to its Melbourne data centre. The upgrade doubled the footprint of the data centre, allowing Primus to expand its offering of virtual web hosting, ASP services, e-commerce, co- location and dedicated server farms.

Primus' decision to retain Australian call centre staff comes amid a growing customer backlash against offshore call centres. A recent customer churn survey undertaken by BMC Software found 75 per cent of respondents listed onshore call centres as a key to customer loyalty.

   


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Thoughts on this article? Add a comment below.
Comments: 2
Good work Primus on keeping at least 1 call center in the country ;)
iTnews - comments icon Posted by Hartz,  May 1, 2008 4:17 PM
I hope that everyone who stumble upon this page will read this comment.
The worst experience I have ever had was this morning (September 4th, 2008) with IPrimus Customer Service from the Billing area. Not only that they couldn't solve my problem, but they were arguing with me refusing to pass my call to the supervisor with all possible excuses. Sam, the male customer service officer who took my call at 8:10 am and was with me for 10 minutes, repeatedly refused to call the supervisor, although I have asked for the team leader/supervisor more that 10 times. He said that the supervisor is not there and refused to provide his Primus ID number so that I can lodge a complaint against him. The next call was picked up by Sara (a female consultant), who kept me on hold for 15 minutes, trying to find a (non existant)recording as a proof that I requested my telephone services to be bundled with my Internet. And that was a problem.
At the end of July I got a phone call from IPrimus representative, who in the next 30 minutes tried to persuade me to get a different broad band connection and transfer my telephone services to IPrimus. I wasn't happy with IPrimus technical support in the past (long waiting to get problems solved) and I refused to get my phone services transferred, no matter how attractive the deal was.
This morning, a month after that incident, I wanted to check usage at my broadband account, only to find out that all my telephone services were transferred to IPrimus and that my line rental is 3 times more expensive than with Telstra - one of the reasons I gave for not wanting to be with IPrimus. So, my telephone services were transferred without my consent, I spend 2 hours on the phone this morning with IPrimus incompetent and rude customer service representatives, there was no help from neither a team leader or a supervisor, I was on hold altogether for 30 minutes, I was promised to get a call from a team leader (Alison) who never called.
I wanted to lodge an official complaint against IPrimus and I couldn't get their address for complaints.

So, if you want to save money, time and common sense, DO NOT choose IPrimus as your telephone provider.
iTnews - comments icon Posted by Vesna,  Sep 4, 2008 12:00 PM
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