Primus Australian call centre creates 1000 jobs

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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