Qantas Keeps Hanging Up on Customers

Unless you’re lucky enough to have Platinum or Platinum One status, dealing with the Qantas contact centre has become a maddening experience lately. The wait times are often astronomical, and if your call is directed to one of the outsourced overseas call centres operated by Mindpearl, the staff are often poorly trained and unable to help. It is an absolute disgrace, but this is not even the worst part.

Recently, a huge number of Qantas customers have also reported that their calls were disconnected or that they were hung up on by the Qantas call centre.

Rude staff hanging up on customers

Occasionally, customers are being deliberately hung up on by staff at the Qantas call centre. Here’s just one complaint that was posted on AFF:

Just got off the phone after 2hours 30mins exactly to make changes on 1 PNR. The person I was talking to had no clue what she was doing and kept putting me on hold but surprisingly she never hanged up the phone. She kept saying she couldn’t see the seats available but I was 100% certain it’s not a phantom award. After 2 hours, she agrees to put her team leader on and this team leader was RUDE A F. Anyway, they were able to find the seats and she said she requested it and submitted it to ticketing.. I don’t even think she did it. I tried to ask her to push the ticketing through but she said no. She asked if there was anything else they can do for me which I replied yes, I have to make another change on another PNR. She straight away replied, telling me that I have to call the reservations line again. I told her what, I have never heard of this before. She goes “yup, because you want to make another change on a different PNR you have to call back. Thank you, good bye” and hangs up on me. But she didnt hang up and put me on hold instead for another 5mins, then I hear noises and then the line disconnects.
This is complete rubbish from the Qantas Centre, they really need to monitor their staff and this is coming from a Team Leader…
– Ktan89, 1 February 2022

This is clearly appalling service. But most of the Qantas call dropouts seem to be caused by an IT issue, rather than staff deliberately hanging up on people.

Regular call dropouts

In some cases, Qantas is hanging up on people who have already been waiting several hours on hold before they even get a chance to speak to somebody.

In other cases, calls are being disconnected after the customer is placed on hold. This seems to happen a lot when dealing with an offshore call centre. The problem is made worse by the fact that staff at these outsourced call centres so frequently place customers on hold – seemingly because they haven’t been adequately trained and don’t know what to do.

Here are just a few AFF posts about this issue…

I have now made 10 calls to the above number since 4pm Yesterday, each time i have been disconnected after being put on hold (sometimes that hold has exceeded 1 hour) . The Fiji CC staff only have basic knowledge and appear to have to refer to other teams for help with anything complex. The wait times to speak to these teams appears to be so long they just disconnect.
– lukus g, 15 February 2022

Was on hold for over 2 hrs before ending up at the Cape Town call centre. Same story to most here, some guy answers (without giving his name) and I ask if I can change my flight to LAX from this week to next week. He puts me on a “brief hold” which takes 20 min before I am disconnected and sent to Qantas’s survey.
– ozgod, 8 February 2022

This is not a one-off issue. It is a systematic and widely-reported problem that has been ongoing for many months, yet hasn’t been fixed.

Qantas knows about this problem, and many of the staff at the call centres are aware of it as they are now promising to call customers back if their call gets disconnected. But this doesn’t always actually happen, meaning customers need to call again and go back to the end of the very long queue.

We recently spoke to a Qantas customer who was actually called back after they were placed on hold and their call was disconnected. The call centre operator told them that their system would not actually let them take the call off hold and that their only option was to disconnect the call.

It’s one thing for Qantas to use outsourced call centres where many of the staff are poorly trained. But it’s another thing entirely for staff to routinely have to hang up on customers. How is this acceptable service?

What does Qantas have to say?

Australian Frequent Flyer asked Qantas why so many calls are being disconnected and when the problem might be fixed. While they acknowledged a technical issue, the airline did not directly address our question or provide a timeline for when the issue might be resolved.

Given this IT failure has been ongoing for many months already, it just doesn’t seem to be a priority.

“The current Omicron situation has driven a huge spike in calls from customers which has meant our customers have been experiencing longer wait times, which we sincerely apologise for,” a Qantas spokesperson said.

“We’ve trained hundreds of new agents and continue to hire and train more so we can reduce wait times as much as possible.

“We are also introducing new processes around call backs to make sure our operators are contacting customers if a call drops out.”

It’s good to hear that Qantas is now trying to get operators to call customers back if their call drops out. But this is just a bandaid solution. If calls weren’t being routinely disconnected in the first place, it wouldn’t be necessary.

Calling customers back is also not a practical solution if the call drops out before a customer has even had a chance to speak to an operator.

Qantas also pointed to the new technology it has invested in during the pandemic to make its call centre more flexible and easier to scale up and down when there are changes to call volumes. The airline hopes to have these improvements in place in the coming months, although Qantas told us the same thing 10 months ago.

While the Qantas call centre has been particularly awful lately, the problems began well before the pandemic. The “COVID” excuse for poor service is starting to run very thin.

You can share your experience and discuss this topic on the Australian Frequent Flyer forum: Qantas Call Centre Long Wait Times