Priya Padmanabhan

BANGALORE: UK-based BPO firm, Vertex, which has around 1800 employees in Gurgaon, is planning to shift more than 700 call center jobs from its Powergen project back to Britain.

Last week, Britain's second biggest energy supplier, Powergen, announced it would close all its call centers in India citing that its customer satisfaction is more important than cost cutting.

Confirming the news, a UK-based Vertex spokesperson said, “Vertex is a service provider for Powergen in India. Powergen and Vertex have been in commercial discussions regarding the provision of their outsourced customer service agreement for some time now. These discussions and related activities have led to the phased return of Indian based operations. As a result, Powergen have publicly announced the return of India call handling back to the UK.”

He added that Vertex is working with Powergen to ensure the smooth transition of these services back to Powergen. About the fate of the Vertex call center employees in Gurgaon working on the account, he said that Vertex is looking at opportunities for redeployment of the impacted employees in India onto existing or potential new work.

Last week, Nick Horler, managing director, Powergen, was quoted in the British press saying: "Offshore call centres may have their place for certain industries.

However, we believe that we can best achieve industry-leading customer service by operating solely in the UK although the cost of overseas outsourcing can be low, we're simply not prepared to achieve savings at the risk or expense of customer satisfaction.''

Powergen plans to hire 980 call center employees across the UK this year.

Incidentally, Vertex, which is a subsidiary of United Utilities, was in the news recently since it was rumored that Indian IT services major TCS is interested in acquiring the company. A United Utilities spokesperson denied this speculation.

"United Utilities has a clear strategy for Vertex. It is part of the group and is not up for sale. With a new CEO on board, there have been a number of expressions of interest in the business and we thought it would be sensible to ask Merrill Lynch to advise on these."

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