After outsourcing its network management and IT operations, Sunil Mittal-owned Bharti Group has given contract of its call centre operations for mobile services to four global majors in a deal, valued cumulatively at Rs 1,000 crore (Rs 10 billion) in 4-5 years.
Bharti on Monday announced entering into strategic partnerships for outsourcing of its call centre operations with Hinduja TMT, IBM Daksh, Mphasis and TeleTech Services, for which these players will set up contact centres in the National Capital Region, Chennai, Hyderabad, Chandigarh, Kolkata, Pune and Bangalore.
"The move would benefit more than 12.5 million existing customers of Airtel and also millions of new subscribers who would be added in coming years in these circles," Bharti Tele-Ventures President (Mobility) Manoj Kohli told mediapersons.
He said the centres would start functioning within next 2-3 months with initial seats of 6,000, which will be expanded later.
However, for high-end users, Bharti will continue to have internal call centres with 1,500 seats, he added.
Bharti Televentures Joint Managing Director Akhil Gupta put the cumulative value of the deal at Rs 1,000 crore in 4-5 years, but exuded confidence that the contract would eventually exceed this value.
He said had Bharti handled this service on its own, value of money would have been much lower because of domain knowledge of each of global players in BPO business.
Meanwhile, Bharti also announced technology outsourcing arrangement with Nortel, which will deliver technology and expert resources to these four partners.
Nortel will provide advanced speech recognition, multimedia contact centre, unified messaging, computer-telephony integration, IP-enabled video communications and receiving and routing calls to the respective customer service partners.
Kohli said all BPO players will provide same service and the customer will not know whether it is receiving the service from one player or the other.
"They will all function on the same platform provided by Nortel," he said.
To a question, Gupta said though initial term of the contract is 4-5 years, the arrangement will practically aimed at long term relationship.
As part of the deal, HTMT would set up the contract centre in Chennai and Hyderabad, IBM Daksh in Chandigarh, Kolkata and Pune, Teletech in NCR and Mphasis in NCR and Bangalore.
The outsourcing deal comes close on the heels of Bharti signing a $250 million network management deal with Swedish equipment supplier Ericsson in June.
Bharti had also entered into a mega $750 million deal for 10 years with IT major IBM for outsourcing its IT operations, which included hardware, software, services and data warehousing among others.
Bharti, the largest GSM cellular operator in the country under Airtel brand, has a subscriber base of over 12 million.
Hinduja TMT, IBM Daksh, Mphasis and TeleTech Services are leading global BPO players, while Nortel is a worldwide major in delivering communications capabilities.
© 2025 Rediff.com -