BPO Firstsource:  Ex Agents stay away
By Madhumita Das

Techgoss had reported earlier that Firstsource Kolkata is facing massive attrition in its Vodafone Process based in Kolkata.  As a measure to reduce the attrition percentage, the senior management at Kolkata, along with the local HR team, carried out a call-back exercise. This decision was taken as there is a dearth of employees on even days when there is normal call flow.

Moreover, the training of new hires would take a time of at least one month, so having tenured and trained employees come back is an option that would put the management and the employees in a win-win situation.

Out of the 300 attrition numbers reported last month, almost 240 were voluntary attritions which had not come back after a long leave, or had not reported to work all of a sudden. These 240 names were divided among the HR Team in Kolkata and they were asked to call back the employees and convince them to come back and join Vodafone again.  This entire exercise was to be carried out with a target to convince the maximum number of employees rejoin their jobs.

The Deputy General Manager (DGM) – Operations, Vodafone, was scheduled to meet the employees at a meeting arranged for these "come-back" employees and hear them out with an aim to be able to work out some agreeable mutual solutions.

However, after the exercise was complete, there were just 30 employees who could be convinced to come back and meet the DGM. To add to the fiasco and make matters worse, only 5 employees turned up at the time of the meeting.

After the exercise, there were findings which were alarming. The major concern that came out was that the first line supervisors did not treat the employees well. There were instances where almost 60% of the employees attrited said that they were not heard – neither by their supervisors, managers or the human resources team.  Another main reason for such huge attrition was a lot of salary issues. There were discrepancies in salary pertaining to night shift allowance, performance payouts, leave reversals and above all salary restructurings. The associates in Vodafone process get a meagre amount of three thousand rupees to four thousand rupees as their salaries and any cuts or deductions in that amount is something that causes a lot of mental torment to the employees. To top it off, these employees are made to overtime forcibly. There have been instances where employees login at 6 am and are made to take calls till 10 pm without any breaks for food or answering nature's calls.

This speaks volumes about the extent of mismanagement at Firstsource in the Vodafone process.

(Techgoss had run the following story on Oct 13, 2008)

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.