Bharti signs Rs 1000 cr outsourcing contract

Sunil Bharti Mittal-owned Bharti Tele-Ventures on Monday announced a Rs 1,000-crore deal to outsource all its call centre operations over the next four-five years to four leading BPOs - Hinduja TMT, IBM Daksh, Mphasis and TeleTech Services.

It also announced a landmark technology outsourcing arrangement with Nortel, wherein the latter would provide technology and expert resources required to provide customer-care services to its customers via voice, advanced speech recognition, multimedia contact centre, unified messaging, computer-telephony integration and IP enabled video communications to the respective customer service partners.

The move comes close on the heels of Bharti signing its second network management deal with Ericsson in June 2005.

Bharti had first signed the $400 million deal with Ericsson in January 2004, which was followed by $250-million deal in June, 2005.

In 2004, Bharti also entered into a $750-million deal with IBM for IT infrastructure maintenance and services. The company also signed a $275 million deal with Nokia and $50 million deal with Siemens in 2004, for its network maintenance.

Bharti Tele-Ventures, is India's leading GSM mobile service provider and has a presence in all the 23 telecom circles in the country.

The company has a subscriber base of 12 million. The outsourcing deals with BPOs and Nortel is the yet another strategic move by the company, which had already outsourced most of its operations.

"This partnership (with the four BPOs and Nortel) will enable us to channelise our resources and expertise to the core areas of product innovation, value-added services, marketing, brand building and customer delight innovations, while simultaneously providing world class mobile services," said Akhil Gupta, Joint managing director, Bharti Tele-Ventures Ltd.

According to him, the call centre operations would be geographically split among the four BPOs. TeleTech and Mphasis would handle the National Capital Region, IBM Daksh the Pune, Chandigarh and Kolkata region while Mphasis and HTMT in will look after Bangalore and Hyderabad and Hinduja TMT the Chennai region.

"The move would benefit more than 12.5 million existing customers of Airtel and the new subscribers who would be added in coming years in these circles," said Bharti Tele-ventures President (mobility) Manoj Kohli.

He also added that centres would start functioning within next 2-3 months with 6,000 initial seats, which will be expanded later. Company executives said that their current call centres, which have also been outsourced, would be integrated with these BPOs.

However, AirTel Care-Touch customers (high-end subscribers) would continue to be under Bharti's 15,000-seater call centre.

Kohli also said that all BPO players would provide same service and the customer would therefore not know the difference between the service providers.