The Hindu Business Line : Bharti outsources call centre operations

(From left) Mr Bhaskar Menon, President, MphasiS; Mr Sanjay Kapoor, President & CEO, TeleTech Services; Mr Ashoka Valia, Managing Director, Nortel India; Mr Akhil Gupta, Joint Managing Director, Bharti Tele-Ventures Ltd; Mr Manoj Kohli, President, Mobility, Bharti Tele-Ventures Ltd; Mr Pavan Vaish, Executive Vice-President, Strategy & Transition, IBM-Daksh; and Mr Partha Sarkar, CEO, Hinduja TMT, at the announcement of Bharti Tele-Ventures' outsourcing deal in the Capital on Monday. — Kamal Narang

New Delhi , Aug. 8

TELECOM major Bharti Tele-Ventures has signed a Rs 1,000-crore deal with four global business process outsourcing companies to outsource its call centre operations for the next 4-5 years.

The deal signed with IBM Daksh, MphasiS, TeleTech and Hinduja TMT envisages setting up contact centres in each of the four zones of the country with 6,000 seats initially over the next 2-3 months.

The deal is part of Bharti's strategy to focus on its core areas of product innovation, marketing, brand building. The company has already outsourced its IT and cellular networking requirements to IBM and Ericsson respectively.

As part of this initiative, HTMT would set up contact centre in Chennai and Hyderabad; IBM Daksh in Chandigarh, Kolkata and Pune; TeleTech in NCR; and MphasiS in NCR and Bangalore. However, for high-end users, Bharti will continue to operate its existing Airtel call centres with a capacity of 1,500 seats.

Bharti also announced a technology outsourcing arrangement with Nortel, wherein Nortel will deliver technology and expert resources required to provide world-class customer services to Bharti's customers via voice, advanced speech recognition, unified messaging, computer-telephony integration, IP-enabled video communications and receiving and routing calls to the respective customer service partners.

"The strategic move would also enable Bharti to provide a standardised, consistent and a high quality experience to all its customers, in all the 23 mobile circles in India. This would also create economies of scale through consolidation of contact centres, which in turn will result in reduction of capital investment for technology upgrades," said Mr Akhil Gupta, Joint Managing Director, Bharti Tele-Ventures Ltd.

While, all the four partners will operationally manage inbound call centre operations of Bharti, the technologies for call routing, prioritisation and IVR, will be managed by Nortel.

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