The Department of Human Services is to employ 2,750 additional call centre workers for its Centrelink customer service team in the next few weeks.
At least 800 of the new jobs will be in Brisbane with the remaining positions based in Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth.
Minister for Human Services and Digital Transformation, Michael Keenan said all of the new staff should be on deck by early next year.
“Centrelink answers about one million calls a week and most calls are answered within our target range of under 16 minutes,” Mr Keenan said.
He said peak times could be challenging however and the extra staff were being hired to ensure community expectations were being met.
He said the new workers were being engaged through partnership arrangements with Australian-based call centre operators who were leaders in their field — a system that was already working well at the Australian Taxation Office.
“The decision to expand this business model to Centrelink also follows a highly successful pilot program launched in October last year, which saw an additional 250 staff engaged through Serco,” Mr Keenan said.
He said an independent review of the Serco pilot found that the workers performed as well, or better than full-time PS staff across a range of measures.
“They answered more calls each day, had less down time between calls, were cost effective and ranked equally for customer satisfaction,” the Minister said.
His comments were rejected by the Community and Public Sector Union however with Deputy Secretary Melissa Donnelly saying the contractors took more calls because they transferred customers to permanent Centrelink staff.
“They’re transferring everything from simple change of address queries right up to the most complex cases,” Ms Donnelly was quoted as saying.
