Sparsh: 4 Team Leaders leave on same day
By Pulkit Sharma

Sparsh is the domestic subsidiary of Intelenet Global Services.  It offers state of the art solutions to Vertical Industries to meet their voice and BPO needs.  In 2008, Sparsh had 5200 seats operating 24 by 7, and was telling investors that it had the potential to scale up to 20,000 seats by 2009.  But it has lost a number of key clients in the last year.

The TATA AIG General Insurance outbound process at Sparsh (Accident and health) has two sub units.  One is the HSBC unit working on the HSBC customer database and the other is the TATA AIG General Insurance process which is further broken into two sub divisions. Among the TATA AIG General Insurance sub divisions, the major one is the TATA AIG General Insurance OOC process and a smaller SIP process running on TATA AIG GI's own database

Techgoss had learnt that there were 4 Team Leaders (of which 2 were Team Managers) looking after 60-75 Agents in the OOC Process.  But on August 3, 2009, all four put in their papers and were relieved with immediate effect.  One who was on a notice period had it waived.

Techgoss had learnt Deputy Managers and Operations Managers have been forced to step in to handle this process providing TATA AIG GI with nearly 2 crores of revenue each month. According to an Agent, this process used to provide a minimum of Rs. 125 lakhs of assured revenue to TATA AIG GI.

Insiders feel that with the co-coordinated exit of the 4 Team Leaders, the process may not even achieve Rs. 60 lakhs a month. TATA AIG GI started operating at Spanco (prior to the takeover by Sparsh BPO) and two of these agents had been working for four continuous years to become Team Managers handling two team leaders plus their own team. No violations or any kind of irregularities had been reported.

And why did these four Team Leaders leave?  All due to a Deputy Manager who did not like the four. 

Needless to add, the loss of all front line supervisors at the same time will be a big blow to Sparsh.  In most BPOs, such managers have strong bonds with their employees and are looked upon for guidance by them.

Quite separately, the client has asked Sparsh BPO to ramp down 30 seats across the TATA AIG General Insurance process.

(Techgoss had published the following article on Aug 13, 2009)

Sparsh BPO tax issues
By Pulkit Sharma

Sparsh is the domestic subsidiary of Intelenet Global Services.  It offers state of the art solutions to Vertical Industries to meet their voice and BPO needs.  In 2008, Sparsh had 5200 seats operating 24 by 7, and was telling investors that it had the potential to scale up to 20,000 seats by next year.  But it has lost a number of key clients in the last year.

Now a Sparsh Agent tells techgoss that one of its processes may not be deducting TDS (Tax Deducted at source) from its employee's payouts.

How does this work?  Or not work?

Every Indian employer provide their employees with a Form 16 which is the statement of income under various heads and taxes debited from salary accounts and the associated details of who has deducted tax and the deposits of the said deducted tax into the government coffers.

Apparently at the TATA AIG General Insurance outbound process at Sparsh BPO, employees receive incentives for their sales of TATA AIG General Insurance's policies sold and active for the first two months from applying for the policy. The techgoss tipster tells us that these do not feature in the Form 16s given to the employees nor is tax deducted on the said income.

Effectively, these constitute nearly 40% of agent salaries, however no TDS is deducted.