DataCom Reviews

Wouldn't recommend anyone to work for them based on the bad experience that happen with them breaking bargaining contract and ruining my family's life. Wish I followed advice from there Google reviews before getting a job, they are spot on with how the owner runs it

Datacom pays its CSRs and all other salaried positions below market wages. If you are hired as a CSR will be paid the Award Wage under the Contact Centre Award MA000023, meaning Datacom would pay you less if it legally could. It appears Datacom has a company policy to pay it’s staff below market wages, which has predictable consequences on the company. Staff turnover is high due to the low pay and the difficult nature of the work. Since you are taking calls from Centrelink recipients you are dealing with people who are constantly in financial stress and hardship. Centrelink recipients call you expecting to get money paid to them, either to get a claim processed or reassessed or an early grant of a payment. However it won’t be Centrelink’s policy to grant these payments or it cannot be done ask quickly as the customer demands. They will then get angry at you personally; swearing, yelling and ranting are common. Team Leaders do have the decency not to blame the CSRs for the customers being unreasonable or complaining about an impossible situation so they will back you up. Training is about 3 weeks long but most of that time is spent reading compulsory training modules from Services Australia, which do very little to prepare people for the kind of enquiries that they get whilst on phones. Australia’s Social Security Legislation and Policy is impossibly complex, and you are required to have knowledge of this from Operational Blueprint (OB), which is Centrelink’s internal manual. OB has thousands of articles at this point so be prepared to know how to search and skim read until you find the right answer. Unfortunately, most CSRs don’t stay long enough to build up experience, confidence and competency. They are underpaid relative to a Services Australia APS4 employee (the equivalent position) by a long way. Unfortunately, due to penny-pinching by the Government more and more of these frontline roles are being outsourced to private companies, it saves a few dollars on staff wages, but you the Australian Taxpayer ultimately pay the price. The price is paid in wasted time on phones, on hold and waiting in the queue to speak to somebody who can help, most of that time the ‘Centrelink’ employee is an outsourced underpaid private employee who really knows very little about the job that they are supposed to be doing. Ultimately public money goes to private profits and nobody is better off except the Executives and Shareholders of these companies.