New Macquarie NOC keeps tech jobs in Australia

A new network operations centre (NOC) will be opened by Macquarie Telecom in Sydney.

This will save at least 13 jobs from being shipped offshore, while also creating more employment opportunities within Australia.

Macquarie previously provided network operation services through a third party, which recently made the decision that it would send the roles to another region. This prompted the Australian telco 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 at 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.”

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 centre will also feature a new technical service desk focused on creating better first-call resolution for customer queries and issues.

A recent report shows there were more than 158,000 complaints made to the Australian Telecoms Industry Ombudsman in the last financial year — an 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.

In creating the NOC, Macquarie aims to continue bucking that trend and grow its net promoter score (NPS), currently sitting close to +70.

“Customer service in our industry is appalling and on a slippery slope,” said Clifton.

“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.”

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 at 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.”

The new NOC will be integrated with Macquarie’s existing call centre in Sydney, The Hub, with the combined centres rebranded to ‘Hub+’.

Image caption: Luke Clifton, Group Executive at Macquarie Telecom.

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