BPO Firstsource risks losing Vodafone
By Rajveer Kalra

Firstsource Solutions is considered as a pioneer in the field of domestic business in the Indian BPO Industry.  Telecom forms a major chunk of the domestic business in Firstsource. The centres of Kolkata, Trichy, Vijaywada and Kochi are the domestic telecom centres and added to the list are the new centres that are to be opened in Siliguri, West Bengal and Bhubaneshwar, Orissa.

The major client in these centres is Vodafone, a leading telecom player in the Indian Telecom field.  In fact, all the centres mentioned above apart from Kolkata centre have only Vodafone processes. In other words, they are solely Vodafone centres.

However, due to mismanagement of one of the centres, the survival of all these centres might be at stake. The Kolkata Centre of Firstsource has a total of 2000 employees, out of which 1200 are in the Vodafone processes.  However, for the past two quarters, the attrition, absenteeism and resignations due to the process mismanagement have been key contributors in the threat faced by Firstsource Domestic Business, the threat of loosing Vodafone, its major client.

The Vodafone process in Firstsource Kolkata is facing an attrition of upto 20% per month, where as the attrition % should be within 5-6 %. There was a time when in 3 days' time, 250 attritions were reported. There were various reasons reported. This and various other factors have led to the Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and internal quality scores of the process to go down to a very great extent. The Vodafone management is thinking about taking back the processes from Firstsource and are in the process of appointing other vendors for their processes.

Now because of the other major international process from the centre going back, or downsizing, the centre is at the state of being closed down. Techgoss is following the story and will get back with more details as and when we find out more.