Aircel: From Sparsh to Spanco
By Pulkit Sharma

BPO Sparsh is a subsidiary of Intelenet Global Services and operates in the Indian market.  Sparsh has 16,000 employees in 20 BPOs across 9 locations in India. On April 9, 2010, Techgoss had exclusively reported on how Indian telecom major Aircel had withdrawn its call centre services being done by Sparsh.  Aircel switched from Sparsh to Mumbai head quartered Spanco BPO.

Spanco is the domestic BPO business of Spanco BPO Ventures Ltd. On its website, Spanco says its satisfied customers include Kotak Life, Citi Financial, Reliance General Insurance, Reliance Communications, Idea, Guthy-Renker, ABN-AMRO and Videocon.

So, how much did Aircel gain by switching its Telecom customer care from Sparsh premises in Gurgaon to Spanco?  An Aircel RFP was responded to by most of the domestic BPO majors.  And after a very competitive bidding process, Spanco was awarded the contract. Spanco BPO had quoted the lowest rates by far, lower than Minacs, Aegis BPO and others.  Techgoss can exclusively reveal Spanco had bid at Rs. 1.20 per call minute

At Sparsh BPO, the process was being billed at a higher rate of approximately Rs 1.97 per call minute.  But as some SLA’s were not met, Aircel wanted a new partner. Incidentally Sparsh BPO had with much fanfare set up the process at Pondicherry by inaugurating a new center to accommodate Aircel's business for the south Indian customers.

The Aircel process at Sparsh BPO, Mumbai was the first to move to Spanco. The transition would have been complete by February 2010.

South India will be next.

(Techgoss had published the following article on April 9, 2010)

Techgoss exclusive: Sparsh losing Aircel?
By Pulkit Sharma

BPO Sparsh is a subsidiary of Intelenet Global Services and operates in the Indian market.  Sparsh has 16,000 employees in 20 BPOs across 9 locations in India.  In 2008, Sparsh was ranked No. 1 in the Dataquest Domestic call centre Survey.  As exclusively reported by Techgoss, Sparsh lost few processes recently.

On its website, Sparsh says: “We leverage Intelenet's knowledge and understanding of international best practices to deliver superior solutions to its customers. Our teams combine deep knowledge of domain and business practices with a laser focus on quality, timeliness and costs. Our combined workforce of over 32,000 employees makes us the 'Second Largest BPO Employer in India' according to Nasscom. With our vastly experienced management team at the helm, Sparsh is committed to remain the leader in the Indian BPO business.”

In Nov, 2008, Indian national media splashed the news of the tie up between Sparsh and national telecom company Aircel.  This strategic deal manifested in Sparsh opening a new delivery centre in Pondicherry.  This south India based BPO was to look after Aircel operations in Tamil Nadu and Chennai circles.

How things have changed since 2008!  A senior Aircel manager rang Techgoss with the news that because of a number of complaints with the Aircel Inbound Customer Care Process being run out of Sparsh’s Thane Center, the process was withdrawn in the first quarter of 2010.  Over 300 people were employed for this process at Sparsh’s centre in Thane, Mumbai. This process which was being run out of Sparsh’s Mumbai offices since 2008 is now being handled by ALLSEC in Pune.  ALLSEC in an international BPO which has taken a stake in erstwhile iSmart BPO.

The tipster from Aircel tells us that the North India customer care operations being handled by Sparsh BPO for Aircel customers is also being moved out.

The south center which was set up by Sparsh at Pondicherry will be letting go of the Aircel Customer care operations soon.