Telecommunications and datacentre provider Macquarie Telecom is opening a new network operations centre (NOC) in Sydney in a move which the company says will “rescue’ at least 13 jobs which would have been moved offshore by a third-party provider.
Macquarie previously provided network operation services through a third party, which it claims recently made the decision it would off-shore the roles to another region, prompting it to build the new NOC and create local jobs in Australia instead.
“Our competitors and many other industries are failing Australians by sending jobs abroad,” said Luke Clifton, Group Executive, Macquarie Telecom.
“We’re angry about this and that’s why we’re committed to doing the very opposite, investing in people and our economy by hiring and nurturing Australian talent and in doing so providing a higher level of customer service that others aren’t up for.”
{loadposition peter}Clifton says the new roles, which add to a number of jobs Macquarie is creating across its business, will be different categories of engineers, who will work from the NOC to assess and respond to network faults and incidents and customer queries depending on their nature and level of complexity.
The new NOC will be integrated with Macquarie’s existing call centre in Sydney, ‘The Hub’, with the combined centres rebranded to ‘Hub+’.
The centre will also feature a new technical service desk which Clifton says will be focused on creating better first-call resolution for customer queries and issues.
Clifton cites a recent report showing there were more than 158,000 complaints made to the Australian Telecoms Industry Ombudsman in the last financial year, “a staggering increase of 41% from the previous year, and roughly four times the number of complaints received by the Financial Ombudsman Service, which deals primarily with banks”.
According to Clifton, in creating the NOC, Macquarie aims to continue “bucking that trend” and grow its already “industry-leading net promoter score (NPS), currently sitting close to +70”.
“Customer service in our industry is appalling and on a slippery slope,” Clifton said.
“Outsourcing jobs can make a quick profit in the short term, but the customer experience suffers when even simple queries take time and unnecessary steps to resolve. It’s a zero-sum game because more resources are needed when the technical expertise isn’t there.
“Keeping our NOC in Australia will not only provide more local jobs, but will save our business money. Our competitors either don’t understand this logic, or don’t have the skills or imagination to pull it off.”
Clifton says the NOC will leverage new operating support and IT management systems to improve fault detection on all services, increase automation of configuration and devices in the network, minimise service downtime or degradation by actively monitoring availability and instigating remediation activities, and reduce repair time by assessing and reporting incident performance in real time.
“NOC engineers will have access to smarter tools that will drive efficiency and enable us to be more proactive with our customers,” said Art Cartwright, Chief Operating Officer, Macquarie Telecom.
“The project also links to our graduate program – young graduates will be able to receive additional training through the NOC. It will be like an incubator for developing more technical career paths.”