Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications
Friday, Dec 03, 2004
Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications Friday, Dec 03, 2004 |
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Logistics
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Airlines AI plans to outsource call centre services
Nina Varghese
Chennai , Dec. 2 AIR India plans to outsource domestic call centre services to handle voice calls, SMS (short messaging service) and fax messages. The service is for queries related to reservations and airport-related activities. The value of the bid is estimated to be about Rs 9 crore, according to the tender document. Other things being equal, purchase preference will be granted to Central public sector enterprises at the lowest valid price bid, says an advertisement issued by Air India. The call centres will be set up in Mumbai (Thane and Navi Mumbai), Delhi (Noida and Gurgaon), and in a southern city, which can be Chennai, Hyderabad or Bangalore. The tender document says that the Mumbai call centre should have a total of 420 seat shifts a week, Delhi 210 and the southern centre 245. According to a source in Air India, outsourcing call centres will help increase the airline's efficiency in customer services. The airline has been increasing seat capacity every year by 12 per cent, and the call centres will be able to handle the extra work better, he said. The payment to the service provider will be made on the basis of the actual number of seats deployed, and a penalty equal to the charges per seat will be imposed, if the requirement of seats is not met. Further, the service provider should have the capacity to augment the seat strength by 50 per cent after commencing the call centre, and as and when required within a period of one month, the document said. The expected outbound call volume per day for western India is 250 calls, northern India 200 and southern India 300. The current approximate incoming call volume per day for western India call centre is 5,950, northern India 2,800 and southern India 3,500. The service provider will arrange for fax numbers for all the three call centres. The approximate incoming fax volume for the western and northern region is 60 and 30 for the south. The approximate outgoing fax volume for Mumbai is 50, Delhi 150 and Southern India 30, the document said. The service provider has to ensure that 80 per cent of the calls are attended in three rings or less. The other service level pre-requisites set out by the tender document are `abandonment' of calls to be less than 5 per cent in a day, the maximum waiting time not to exceed two minutes and e-mail and fax response time to be within 8 hours of receipt.
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