Bharti to outsource its call centers

NEW DELHI: Bharti Televentures, the No 1 private telecom service provider in India, and the poster boy of Indian domestic outsourcing market, is about to go for yet another outsourcing deal. And this time it is a business process-customer service.

The company has decided to outsource most of its front-end customer service call centers and has invited RFPs from potential vendors. The company plans to finalize the deal in the next couple of months, according to sources. Post-deal, only the high value customers will be served directly by Bharti's call centers. The company today has close to 2,000 people in its call centers.

It is learnt that many offshoring service providers will be competing for the deal. Unlike the typical offshore contact center outsourcing deals, Bharti plans to work out a price based on per minutes and not based on a fixed per FTE. Also, the company is looking at a small number of outsourcing service providers for the entire piece of work, which will make the deals quite sizeable.

When finalized, this will be a benchmark deal in more ways than one. For the offshoring service providers, it will be a benchmark in terms of pricing, cost, and the entire business economics. The fact that Bharti is looking at a per minute pricing and not a typical per FTE per hour pricing, will also be a challenge for many, not so familiar with this pricing model.

On the user side, it will be the first such big deal in call center outsourcing. Though Bharti has been a pioneer in outsourcing, both its other deals-network outsourcing to Ericsson and billing application outsourcing to IBM-are telecom specific and has no major learning f or companies in other verticals. On the contrary, the call center deal, if successful could be a benchmark for all companies in general, and all consumer service companies in particular.