Services Australia has apologised to its customers over a sustained blowout in call centre wait times as new figures also reveal a backlog of more than 1.1 million payment claims and significant delays for age pension applications.
Despite the Albanese government employing thousands of new Centrelink staff, only around 50% or 22.4m of the almost 45m calls to Centrelink made in the six months to 31 December were answered and handled by a Services Australia operator.
Over the same period, just over 7.4m calls, or 16.5%, were met with a congestion message and 2.3m were terminated by a customer.
The average wait time between July and December 2023 was 33 minutes. In comparison, the average time between July 2022 and 31 January 2023 was 18 minutes.
Those calling to inquire about family or parenting payments are waiting the longest, with an average time of 52 minutes, followed by those seeking help over disabilities, sickness and careers payments, who waited an average 48 minutes. Callers to the employment services line also waited an average of 48 minutes.
The Services Australia deputy chief executive, Jarrod Howard, apologised to customers who were trying to get through.
“We are working really hard to answer as many calls as we can,“ he said. “I acknowledge and I apologise to any customer who is struggling to get through to us. There is not a person in the agency that does not want to serve customers.”
Howard said the telephone wait times should be reduced by March, when more of the 3,000 new staff hired at the end of last year had been fully trained.
The Services Australia chief executive, David Hazlehurst, also told the committee in Senate estimates that as of December 2023, 1.1m payment claims remained outstanding.
At the same time, the average number of days to process claims is also blowing out, hitting 40.1 days in December, up from 33.2 in July last year, the tabled documents reveal.
A claim for the age pension is meant to have a “timeliness standard” of 49 days but in December last year the average processing time was 91 days, up from 61 in August and 35 days in the 2021-22 financial year.
The jobseeker payment, which is meant to be processed in 16 days, hit an average processing time of 24 days in December, down from 29 in August, but up from nine days in the 2021-22 financial year.
The disability support pension average was sitting at 86 days while Austudy claims were waiting an average of 50 days to be processed.
“Reducing this backlog of claims is critical,” Hazlehurst said. “Not only because it means Australians are waiting longer to get the support they need but also because longer processing times lead to longer wait call times as customers call to check on the progress of their claim.”
He said hoped to get the outstanding claims back down to between 400,000 and 500,000 by April.
“I would expect that by the middle of the year, particularly in relation to new claims on hand, we’d expect to see things back more towards what we would expect to be a reasonable standard.”
