Air NZ contact centre crisis: Long wait times for Kiwi travellers could continue for months

Air New Zealand says it is hiring 200 more staff to its embattled contact centre – but training them all up will take eight weeks. Since the borders reopened in March, allowing Kiwis to travel overseas without having to quarantine on their return, customers have been facing hours-long waits to speak to airline staff, with the airline's social media pages inundated with complaints. Air New Zealand says it has been struggling to keep up with the massive increase in customer calls. The airline’s chief customer and sales officer Leanne Geraghty said pre-Covid, one in eight customers would call prior to travel, but now there were hearing from one in three. The average call time was also up by approximately 50 per cent, to around 16 minutes, due to the more complex enquiries brought about by Covid-19 and the changing travel requirements. One of the key reasons people were calling now was for new bookings, seeking assistance for using credits or multiple forms of payment, and enquiring about specific routes. Customers preparing to travel also wanted reassurance they would meet the requirements for their destination. “The demand has come back a little quicker than what we have anticipated,” Geraghty said. In the initial stages of the pandemic, Air New Zealand did reduce staff numbers in its contact centre, Geraghty said. But it ended up having to hire more to deal with enquries about changing schedules and cancelled flights, flight credits and refunds. “We also had some short-term staff employed in the contact centre to help us through other peak periods of demand as we we’ve worked through the pandemic,” Geraghty said. “But now we need to recruit at much larger numbers to help us with the demand we’re seeing come through.”<br/>