Supporting Indigenous customers with new centre

That’s why we’re opening a new contact centre in Darwin dedicated to the answering of customer enquiries and the reporting of faults from Indigenous communities around Australia.

Every year we receive 25,000 calls from Indigenous communities. These calls are on a range of issues, relating to connectivity, billing or general enquiries about our products and services.

From today, when our First Nations Connect contact centre opens, these calls will be serviced by a dedicated Darwin-based hub, using staff who are regionally based and of Indigenous descent. We’re also anticipating that some of these calls will be taken and solved in-language for our Indigenous customers.

Our Indigenous customers can now directly call the Darwin contact centre via the Telstra First Nations Connect hotline on 1800 444 403. Customers from Indigenous communities will still be able to call the standard 13 22 00 line, and we will use data sources such as mobile base station and fixed line locations, postcodes and census information to divert incoming calls to the new Darwin centre.

With a focus on customer service, the new contact centre is based in our Darwin office and will operate five days a week between the hours of 9am and 5pm. Calls made outside this time will be responded to by trained operators located in Australia.

This new contact centre will complement our existing regional centres in Townsville, Hobart, and Adelaide that currently manage calls that come in when a customer is located over 100km from one of our stores.

We are committed to building and maintaining trust with all of our customers, including operating responsibly and learning from the feedback we receive. It’s a daily test that we hold ourselves to.

I’m excited to see the results from our new contact centre, and to welcome our new colleagues from these regional communities into our team