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Strategies & Market Trends : India Coffee House -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mohan Marette who wrote (7745)	10/4/1999 10:09:00 PM
From: Mohan Marette	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12475

Usha Martin to set up call centres for US corporates Usha-Martin Industries ushamartin.com Usha-Martin Telekom commandcell.com Suman Das Sarma -ET CALCUTTA 3 OCTOBER THE USHA Martin group of the Jhawars is setting up call centres in India for outsourcing telephony services for US corporate houses. The Jhawars are negotiating with some of the US telephony service providers to set up a joint venture to start its call-centre services. PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) has been appointed by the Jhawars to conduct a detailed study about extending the call centre service for Indian companies and for outsourcing other similar knowledge-based services from the overseas market. Usha Communications and Technology, the group?s software development company, is also looking at developing software for "remote billing" for telecommunication services where billings for international wired and wireless communications services will be carried out by centres located in India. The call centres planned by the Usha Martin group will handle business queries and order through telephone for US companies. The call will be routed from the US centres to India where the call centres will provide data, reply to queries, carry out phone-banking, or even book international air tickets and make hotel reservations. The economics of the call-centre business works on wage arbitrage. With cheap and well-educated English speaking manpower available in India and call centres needed to be highly staffed, India is expected to soon become the second hub for such centres after Ireland. Currently, the bulk of telephony outsourcing through call-centre businesses are located in Ireland. According to Navin Kaul, senior vice-president, Usha Martin, of the $102-billion telephony business, only about 10 per cent is currently outsourced. With communications becoming cheaper by the day, the potential for call centre and outsourcing business for a country such as India is huge. For example, a call centre in India will act as the technical help desk for Sony or Compaq?s international marketing and after-sales service. Calls from all over the world, either as a toll-free call or charged call, will be routed to India where the call-centre staff will immediately reply to queries or even complete a sale transaction. Usha Martin is planning to set up one of its call centres for a US client in Bangalore. The minimum employee strength for a call centre, to start with, would be around 200. The employment in bigger centres could be as high as 350-400. More centres will also be planned in other cities depending upon the number of accounts it manages. Since the call-centre service requires good verbal communications, Usha Martin group is planing to train employees in the pros and cons of talking to the US population and the different cultural aspects usually associated with US consumers. The use of call centres in the US market could be easily gauged when toll-free numbers such as 1800, used to call up call centres, accounts for 40 per cent of the total telecom traffic in the US. In UK, the percentage use of toll-free number is much less at around 8 per cent. The department of telecommunications (DoT) has just introduced a similar toll-free number (1600) for the Indian market which is believed to have generated interest among Indian companies.