Convergys to hire 20,000 people in India

BANGALORE: Convergys, the world’s largest contact center will be hiring 20,000 contact center employees in India by 2007. The company began its operations in the country in Gurgaon in 2001 and already has 3500 employees. By the end of this year, that number is expected to grow to 6,500. Speaking at a press conference here on Wednesday to announce the opening of its second integrated contact center in India in Bangalore, John C Freker, president, customer management group said the company was in a major ramp up phase.

The company started with 600 seats a little over a year ago and is expected to ramp up to 4000 seats across India by year end. On a thumb rule basis, each seat can account for two employees in two shifts.

As of now the company has two sites. One in Gurgaon where it has 3,125 people to date. The second that was commissioned in Bangalore on Wednesday currently has 380 people. It has invested in 200,000 sq ft of space in Gurgaon and 170,000 sq ft of space in Bangalore

The company plans to start two more new facilities by early 2004. Though it does not specify where these new sites will come up, Freker said they would naturally be around areas like Delhi (which still has lot of room for growth) and other major cities with large English speaking populations. These would however be smaller housing about 700-1000 seat sites.

The reason for the ramp up is straight-forward. "We have all the leading corporations of different verticals like the largest bank and the largest telco, who are our clients. And all of them without exception are moving offshore work to India. The drive is coming from them," Freker, said. So far the company has about 14-15 clients who have offshored the activities to India. "And about 90 percent of them are still in a pilot stage and are expected to get full-blown" he added.

This is a significant development considering that the company has about 44,000 employees across 44 contact centers in North America, 8 in Canada, and some in the Netherlands and the UK. It also plans to open two sites in Manila in Q3 2003.

Freker said that while he saw growth in the company’s North America centers flattening out, India remained a high growth geography for them. Interestingly, the company is also doing work on IVR and speech recognition technologies, and according to Freker, " every deal today has a local North America component, and offshore component mostly out of India and an IVR component."

The author is Assistant Editor, Voice& Data