Telecommunications giant Telstra has pledged to bring its overseas call centres back to Australia within the next 18 months. A drop in customer call volume, and the prevalence of employees working from home, has allowed the country’s biggest telco to make the call. “We have reduced the volume of calls by eliminating a lot of the annoyances that people would have had,” Telstra CEO Andy Penn told attendees during a speech at the Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) on Thursday. “We are helping people get more out of the technology rather than reporting a fault,” he said. Telstra currently employs thousands of call centre operators overseas, Penn told 3AW radio. Customer call volume has dropped from 50 million in 2016 to 15 million in 2020. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, Telstra has also adopted a “location agnostic” philosophy, allowing more workers to stay at home. Around 80 percent of …