Airtel in outsourcing pact with Firstsource

The company did not disclose the size of the deal, but industry sources said its a small size deal.    

As per the agreement, Firstsource would provide BPO services covering both voice and back office in areas such as customer accounting, VAS provisioning, fraud and credit monitoring, customer service, collections, customer retention and from its centres in Chennai and Mumbai.     

Firstsource would set up centres in Vashi, New Bombay and Chennai for Airtel and expects to have over 1,000 employees in the first year focused on providing services in English and 8 other regional languages to Airtel's customers, it added.     

Earlier, Bharti had outsourced its telecom managed services with Nokia in a $400 million deal and had also outsourced IT services with IBM in an estimated $700-$750 million deal.     

Bharti has strategic BPO partners in Aegis, Firstsource, Hinduja TMT (HTMT), IBM Daksh, Mphasis and Teleperformance.     

"The partnership will support our extraordinary growth and allow us to focus on our core business of creating innovative products and services for our customers and our partners," Bharti Airtel's Director, Customer Service and Information Technology, Jai Menon said.     

Firstsource's Joint Managing Director and COO Raju Venkatraman said, "We look forward to leveraging our process expertise to help Airtel get better operational flexibility, productivity and increased customer satisfaction". Firstsource currently derives 36 per cent of its revenue from the telecom vertical, it said.