Aircel hands abuse tapes to BPO Sparsh
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.

Now, an Aircel manager has told techgoss about an awkward meeting they had with the powers that be at Sparsh. Aircel has outsourced its Call Center for inbound prepaid customers to Sparsh BPO located at Deonar, Mumbai. During July-August, there was a process review with the CSD (Customer Service & Delivery) Head for the Aircel Mumbai circle, senior Aircel managers, the highly regarded Sparsh COO Gayatri Balaji as well as other Sparsh BPO executives at Gurgaon. It is common for recorded calls to be played back during such review meetings.

The Aircel manager tells techgoss that at the onset of the meeting one of the Senior Aircel employees apologized for the language used in the recorded calls he was about to play back. He began the call which had the customer service agent abusing the Aircel client in vernacular with references to his mother and sisters.

Additionally, the senior executive from Aircel also stated that there have been 28 such calls recorded by them, leaving the senior management of Sparsh BPO red faced and apologetic across the meeting.

There were calls played back reflecting quality at an abysmal low;  where when customers complained about Aircel's service, the customer service agent at Sparsh's Aircel process states that "why did you buy the service then?”

All these service complaints have left Aircel's management frustrated and in a business where the customer is king and Aircel the fourth player in Mumbai's telecom circle, each call minute matters to its reputation and bottom line.

Last we heard that a couple of days ago the manager responsible for running the process has moved out, this movement would in all possibilities be prompted by Aircel's senior management.