Flight Centre has handed Optus $75 million for another five years of its services, inking an agreement to move to a virtualised contact centre within the next 12 months.
The travel agency will shift all of its call centres to Optus’ contact centre-as-service suite. The cloud-based solution will allow Flight Centre to offer its customers email and web chat options, personalised services through CRM integration, self service via interactive voice response, speech recognition, and courtesy call backs.
Internally, the contact centre solution will give the company access to intelligent call routing, workforce management tools, and real-time resource reporting.
Flight Centre hopes the technology will allow it to squeeze the most from its call centre staff as it faces declining profits and a threat from discount airlines and flight comparison sites.
"With the rapid pace of change both within our industry and in technology, Flight Centre has had to consistently change and keep raising the bar and value to our customers," Flight Centre COO Melanie Waters-Ryan said in a statement.
“Key to our successful transformation is the shared desire with Optus to deliver superior experiences for our customers.”
The company operates 1150 stores in Australia and employs 9000 staff.
It said the contact centre overhaul was the first stage in what it describes as the “next phase of its transformation strategy” that will continue through to 2021.
The $75 million extension will see Optus continue to deliver global security, unified communications, network services, and collaboration services across the Flight Centre network.
