Lufthansa Global Telesales (GTS): Start your career in Cape Town

Global Telesales Cape Town - a subsidiary of Lufthansa German Airlines – is a leading service provider for the airline industry. With more than 400 employees, it serves clients such as Lufthansa, Swiss International Airlines, Austrian Airlines and other travel-related industries in five different languages and handles around 2million customer events per year.

GTS Cape Town was the first international Service Centre established in South Africa. What started more than 10 years ago as an overflow Call Centre, has evolved into a leading part of Lufthansa's global network – the GTS Group - with its 8 Service Centres worldwide. The Cape Town branch was recently awarded BEST Employer South Africa 2010/11 by the CRF Institute (benchmarked against other global and well-established companies in South Africa) and was the only service centre featured in the top 50.

"For GTS, people are the pulse and the backbone of the company", explains Birgit Thuemecke, Managing Director of the GTS Group. "To deliver outstanding customer service we have to motivate and engage with our staff, employ people with the right skill and mindset, and provide them with the right training." To drive engagement and loyalty, GTS has established a successful reward and recognition program and has also implemented internationally recognised training and development tools.

Apart from a competitive salary package and the usual legislated benefits, GTS has put additional remunerations into place. Employees not only enjoy flight discounts for themselves and their families but the company also offers 21 vacation days annually, pays two-thirds of the medical-aid contributions, has a provident fund, and offers life insurance and disability cover.

Thuemecke says that the future looks bright for GTS Cape Town, which could potentially double its business in the next few years. In line with changing customer needs, GTS is diversifying its service portfolio significantly and expanding its operation to accommodate these new services.

"Due to our phenomenal growth, we constantly need new talent." People who are successful at GTS have that "can-do, want-to-do" passion and enjoy what they do. "To make it in this demanding environment, a potential employee must be proactive, adaptable and curious. Working for GTS means working within a young, international and vibrant team with seventy percent of the staff being under the age of 35 years. It's our complementary, diversely inspired, team of passionate people who makes GTS Cape Town deliver outstanding customer service 24/7, 365 days a year."