The Hindu Business Line : BPOs resume outbound work for UK clients — Queries deluge for staff on National Rail work

INDIAN business process outsourcing companies on Friday resumed outbound telemarketing and collection operations for their UK clients, a day after a series of blasts in London brought life to a grinding halt .

The BPO companies had suspended all outbound telemarketing and collection calls to the UK on Thursday, to empathise with the nation in its moment of tragedy.

"We have resumed all activities to the UK today. Yesterday, we suspended outbound telemarketing and collection work from Northern Ireland and Delhi facilities, for our UK customers. We, however, continued the inbound work," Mr Ranjit Narasimhan, Chief Operating Officer of HCL Technologies BPO Services Ltd, said.

HCL has BPO operations in Northern Ireland with 2,000 employees and serves clients in retail, insurance and media sectors in the UK, in addition to BT. It also serves some UK clients from its BPO operations in Delhi. "Outbound work was suspended for both Northern Ireland and Delhi operations, after discussions with our clients," Mr Narasimhan said adding that all these calls were generally routed through the International Private Leased Circuit and not the regular phone lines, and ruled out the possibility of clogging of lines.

As commuters in London returned cautiously to work on Friday, for Mumbai-based Epicenter Technologies too, business to the UK began to return to a state of near normalcy.

"On the collections side, the work slowed down yesterday and then it was completely shut down. Similarly, in case of telemarketing, we felt it will be insensitive to make sales calls. While the collection work has resumed, telemarketing is in the process of resuming," Mr Navanit, Chief Operating Officer, Epicenter Technologies, said.

The company has a Fortune 100 bank in the UK as its client on the collection side, while in case of telemarketing it does work for five telecom players.

For Epicenter, which provides collections and telemarketing services, the UK accounts for 15 per cent of the company's revenues.

Mr Prakash Gurubaxani, CEO, Transworks, said the company's out-bound operations to the UK have resumed. "We expect to attain normalcy within a couple of days," he added.

Transworks, an AV Birla Group company, services five clients in the UK, mainly in the telecom and the Internet service provider space. The company's outbound efforts to the UK account for close to 10 per cent of the operations, he added.

According to Mr Saurabh Srivastava, Executive Chairman, Xansa (India), there was no impact on the company's operations in the UK. "We do not do call centre work, but handle complex processes entailing areas such as credit card frauds, billings for utilities and financial and accounting services for a range of customers," he said.

Our Mumbai Bureau reports: Intelenet Global Services had 40 per cent more staff deployed on work for Britain's National Rail on Thursday. The staff had to work without a break; so intense were the call frequencies they had to handle that Intelenet could not afford to even have them move to the cafeteria. Instead, food was served to them at their workplace, said a spokesperson for Intelenet.

Employees cannot be moved from one customer delivery centre to another, they being specifically trained to handle a particular customer. The result was that all the team leaders and the quality control supervisors too pitched in to handle calls, according to Mr Ashok Dhawan, Chief Operating Officer, Intelenet.

Yet, there were 100 calls waiting as of yesterday, said a spokesperson for Intelenet. The entire National Rail team is working overtime still, even though calls have eased off compared to yesterday, and there were between 10 and 20 calls waiting.

Intelenet has 5,000 employees but would not disclose how many are working in the National Rail contact centre.

The calls handled were enquiries on routings, disruptions, timings of trains and the like. National Rail is the national rail service of Britain and is different from the suburban services in London, which are operated by several organisations.

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