The Hindu Business Line : MS tech support centre to expand

The Global Technical Support Centre of Microsoft Corporation in India has grown to more than 1,000 people in barely two years, handling support work for the region for over 170 Microsoft products.

The Managing Director Global Technical Support Centre, Microsoft India, Mr Manish Sinha, told Business Line that it was not an issue of merely adding people, but growing along as the demand was fuelled by the need to service more products.

Career option

"However, we would not like to give any numbers as to how many people we would add and in a particular time frame, as it is tough to induct a candidate for a tech service job in India, where there is paucity of talent in this growing area," he explained.

In most countries — particularly the US and Europe, engineers take to tech support careers even as they graduate from their colleges. But in India there is great lack of awareness among engineers about a career in a high-end tech support centre. Often there is this wrong notion that tech support is part of the business process outsourcing (BPO) wave, which in fact is not the case in reality.

Typically, most companies that deploy technology have people who can solve their problems. But when a matter is referred to Microsoft GTSC, it is almost a fourth level issue, by then already three layers of experts would have tried to fix the problem. This escalates to GTSC. The complexity can be gauged from the fact that it takes about 500 to 600 minutes to resolve such a problem.

The GTSC is part of about 5,000-people strong team spread across different geographies, and the one in India handles the region mainly in English, he said.

"As a part of our efforts to improve the flow of engineers who would build careers in tech support, we are in parleys with the Natioanl Association of Software and Services Association (Nasscom) and engineering colleges, to recognise this as a separate stream and provide suitable training towards such career path," Mr Sinha said.