Indian outsourcing goes from strength to strength

Call centre outsourcing giant Convergys has announced it is to open its second Indian integrated contact centre in Bangalore.

Staff will start to man the phones at the new centre in the next month and once it is up to capacity, sometime within the next 14 months, it is expected to employ around 3,000 people.

Located in Bangalore, India's 'Silicon Plateau', the contact centre will provide both general support and advanced technical help desk services to a variety of Convergys clients, many of whom operate in the high tech sector.

Jack Freker, president of Convergys Customer Management Group, said: "The 3,000 employees in our first India contact centre in New Delhi have validated our strong belief that India offers a motivated workforce of highly-dedicated, well-educated, English-speaking professionals and the infrastructure needed to deliver world-class customer care.

"We will continue to utilise this pool of talented individuals to deliver consistent, responsive, and cost-effective customer care across multiple channels for many clients."

Freker added: "We will be hiring not only contact centre agents in Bangalore, but also many highly-trained, high-tech employees who will be handling technical help desk inquiries by both telephone and internet involving the most advanced technology."

Increasingly more and more companies have been looking at outsourcing call centre operations to India, primarily because of the potential cost savings.

The demand for high-tech staff in India to meet the outsourcing boom has become so great that the country faces the very real danger of having too few people for the wealth of positions available.

Conversely the move to the subcontinent has resulted in a severe cull of positions in the UK call centre sector, with ten of thousands of staff facing lay-offs.

Convergys currently employs more than 44,000 people in 45 call centres worldwide.