Servion to offer training on building call centers

By Latha Kartikeyan

CHENNAI: Servion Global Solutions Limited, a company that provides CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) solutions, will soon be offering its expertise in the form of a training course through Netlabs, its training division. CTI involves an IVR (Integrated Voice Response) system and is used basically for call centers in banking, finance, telecom, healthcare, hotel industry, etc. The purpose of the course is to train people in building call centers.

The course modules will enable the students to specialize in areas like customer support, software engineering, netware engineering and business response consulting. The company expects to generate a revenue of Rs 1 crore from the new course by March 2000. According to Netlabs general manager R. Chandrashekar, "There is a huge potential market for Internet telephony. With an expected 90 million phone connections by 2000, CTI is going to be the buzzword in the industry very soon." The course includes modules on networking, software applications like C, VB, SCO Unix, basic telephony and switching etc.

Servion, which offers a gamut of services including voice mail, speech recognition systems, touch screen, call centers, internet call center, intranets etc, is a value added reseller for Dialogic Corporation, a hardware manufacturer, for voice cards, and Lucent Technologies, which provides the entire package (including software and hardware). Servion has completed close to 100 installations of their solution and some of its clients include ABN AMRO Bank, Deutsche Bank, Global Trust Bank, HDFC Bank, SR Cellphones, ICICI, Citibank etc. CTI costs anywhere between Rs 20 lakhs and 4 crores to install, depending on the degree of customization.

For the duration of six months, the courses, priced between Rs 1.25 lakhs and 2 lakhs, is open to engineering students, MCAs and computer science students. Each batch, however, will be restricted to 10 students. Servion Assistant Manager, Marketing Communication Vaishali A. Shah said that the institute also guarantees 100 per cent placements at the end of the course. The company expects to churn out 50 students by March 2000. "A number of companies in US are looking for such professionals as well. Initially, the students will be absorbed in various positions in the country as there is an industry shortage of trained CTI professionals here. Later, as they gain some experience, we might send them to US," said Shah.