Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, and just damned annoying if you’re one of the several thousand Centrelink customers stuck on hold for an eternity.
Frontline agency Services Australia is yet again conspicuously struggling to absorb inbound call volumes, with what staff it can still find, as it tries to wean itself off outsourcing dependency.
It’s a rough comedown.
The Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) on Wednesday night hit the industrial alarm button over call volumes at the welfare agency’s giant contact centres, as wait times and dumped calls again exploded.
As previously reported in The Mandarin, multinational outsourcer Serco last month had a $343 million contract to supply a Victorian call centre to Services Australia junked through non-renewal, sending more than 600 of the Serco team from the staff side to the client side of the Centrelink counter — and potentially forcing them to wait on hold on the same lines they once staffed.
There is a rub for other government agencies too. Services Australia often acts as a white-label service for other official government crisis hotlines like disaster and emergency relief.
Call centre meltdowns are par for the course for any minister assuming responsibility for Centrelink, with a 2014 audit being the low point after phone lines were weaponised as a barrier to entry to frog march people to online services. That sometimes worked.
The Albanese government is now attempting to replace long-term outsourcers, and their often low-wage and casual employees, with permanent Australian Public Service staff, with contracts like Serco’s running out at the end of the last financial year.
Calling in help from Mumbai or Manilla is not an option.
So it’s a bumpy track, with a very tight market for both labour availability and the money to pay for it. The staff shortages mean that calls get parked on hold … before people voluntarily abandon them by hanging up or on-hold timers just time out.
The public service union now says things have now gone from bending to breaking.
“The situation in Services Australia has reached a crisis point and the federal Labor government needs to urgently act to secure the future of current employees and increase overall staffing numbers,” warned CPSU national secretary Melissa Donnelly.
“Tens of thousands of phone calls are going unanswered every day in Services Australia because there aren’t enough people working in the agency to meet demand. Prior to the pandemic, Services Australia staffing levels were not adequate, and they aren’t adequate now.”
Government services minister Bill Shorten is personally wearing the problems, acknowledging the staffing issues. Shorten sheeted the causes of the issues back to the previous government, but took responsibility for fixing them.
“It’s hard to fix the vandalism of my predecessors overnight. We found an extra 850 jobs for natural disasters, which is good. But it’s going to take a while to repair the vandalism,” Shorten told The Mandarin.
“We are repairing the damage.”
“In the meantime, we’ve managed to secure funding for myGov and the building of that system. We’ve got more than two million uploads of the app we launched in December, we’ve just got to encourage more people to go online.”
Shorten said his “immediate priority is the Ashton Review” into security risk management at Services Australia, which was initiated after a team leader was stabbed by a client at the Centrelink service centre at Airport West in Melbourne in May.
“We are looking at how we keep frontline workers safe,” Shorten said, describing the incident as “dreadful”.
There is a real issue here, too.
In Sydney, a Service NSW customer service officer was repeatedly stabbed and left in critical condition at the agency’s Haymarket branch in May. In April, a 29-year-old Sydney paramedic was stabbed to death in Campbelltown.
One of the biggest issues customer service leaders face with the mix of welfare delivery channels is that as more able customers naturally gravitate to electronic and digital self-service interfaces, it concentrates the level of customers with serious issues presenting at bricks and mortar offices.
The issue has been on the rise for around a decade, with Centrelink counter staff a prime target. That’s where the money is.
“The incident was one of far too many where frontline workers have faced violence and aggression while doing their job — from Services Australia staff to electorate officers to any government servant,” Shorten said at the time of the stabbing.
“Services Australia staff choose this career to support Australians and we need to support them. Everybody should be able to return home safely from work every day.”
Services Australia told The Mandarin there was action being taken to address the shortfall in frontline call centre staff, pointing to funding in the most recent federal Budget.
“As the Budget papers show, our staffing is returning to more regular levels now that pandemic era work, and associated extra resourcing, has concluded,” a Services Australia spokesperson said.
“However, we’re bolstering our emergency response capability with 850 staff directly supporting frontline service delivery.
“To provide the best possible support for customers at this busy time of year, we’re adjusting resources to maximise our frontline staffing levels. This includes drawing from these emergency response capabilities.
However, the CPSU wants a bigger bump to staff and is not backing down.
“The numbers we are seeing are alarming, as is the feedback from the community. We fear that the current situation is worse than anything we’ve seen in the past,” CPSU national secretary said.
“Services Australia should be doing everything in their power to retain the staff they currently have. This agency isn’t immune from the attraction and retention crisis currently plaguing the APS, so the idea that they are letting staff who are trained and experienced go, is simply absurd.”
Donnelly said the unfortunate reality is that Australians trying to access help from Services Australia “can expect this situation to deteriorate if the government fails to act”.
While Shorten is copping the flak, he’s also urging the union to be realistic rather than opportunistic about what it will take to replenish the ranks with permanent APS staff.
The CPSU is likely to be a net beneficiary from previously outsourced staff being members of the Australian Services Union switching membership to the CPSU, one of the reasons the fracas broke cover.
“[To] the [CPSU’s] criticism that there’s been a reduction over the years of the Coalition … I can’t rebuild Rome in a day,” Shorten bluntly told The Mandarin.
“They are drawing attention to issues, which is their job.”
It is understood that negotiations with the ASU and Serco ultimately secured another fortnight’s pay for workers being let go from the outsourcer.
Shorten said the Albanese government “acted to ensure workers affected by the expiry of the Serco call centre contract received four weeks paid notice”.
“The minister acknowledges the leadership of Imogen Sturni and the Australian Services Union, who fought tirelessly and fearlessly to protect the interests of their workers and the broader call centre workforce,” Shorten’s office said.
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Services Australia dumps $343 million Serco call centre deal, 610 staff to be sacked
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