BPO waves goodbye to Airtel Account
By Rajat Sharma

MOTPL, one of the oldest names in domestic BPO, has taken a strong step and released its 200 seats business with Telecom major Airtel. The BPO has handled customer support business for long with Airtel.  MOTPL were forced into this decision as the account had ceased to be profitable. Looks like the consolidation for SME BPOs in Indian domestic business has gained pace.

InfoVision sold to Serco. Then, in a similar incident, FCS shut down 120 seats (its entire workforce in Chennai) working on the Reliance Web World account. The inside story on MOTPL is that Airtel was not paying its dues on time, which added to the constant pressures on rates, and made the business unviable for the BPO. We spoke to some other vendors (who do not wish to be named) and they had similar complaints about Airtel. One said that payments have been pending for as long as 8-10 months at Airtel with no definite payment commitment in sight. Given this state of affairs, vendors are in the right to be upset with the company.

It is interesting to note that there is a special act for Micro and Small Industries which mandates that all SMEs be paid their dues within 45 days. In cases of violation there are special cells in each State Governments where one may report the violation and corrective action may be taken against the erring companies who do not make payments to vendors in time.

We also have unconfirmed reports that Airtel is restructuring their vendors and shall consolidate their outsourcing through firing a large part of their vendors. This may result in job losses or benched staff, none of which is good news. But in the last 2 days some large domestic outsourcing deals have been announced, leading to some sighs of relief in the industry and the hope that things ill improve soon.