Sparsh loss is vCustomer gain
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. vCustomer is a leading provider of customer life cycle management solutions and services. vCustomer manages operations in India, Philippines, UK and USA. A high profile Sparsh client has just switched to vCustomer.

vCustomer, on its website, mentions how it is the first company to implement Voip on a CISCO platform.  It has 30 marquee clients spread across different industries.

A little bird tells Techgoss that Transamerica Direct Marketing had an outbound insurance products customer acquisition process running with Sparsh BPO at their Thane offices since the first quarter of 2010.  It was launched with much fanfare but the process shut down at Sparsh within 5 months.

By the second week of May, 2010, this Transamerica Direct Marketing process at Sparsh had wound up.  The Agents were moved to other processes.  Some managers were moved but the decision on remaining managers in pending.  This Process used to telemarket several medical insurance products in the non life domain.
 
Transamerica markets insurance company’s products and is a part of the Aegon Religare group in India. They have tied up with various insurance companies in the non life domain to market their products over the phone to the general public.

According to Transamerica insiders, Sparsh’s loss is vCustomers gain.  The vCustomer offices in Navi Mumbai started hiring and training Agents and managers in April for this Transamerica Direct Marketing process once it went live from their offices in May. The same process moved to vCustomer offices in Navi Mumbai during the month of April and hiring and training had begun there well before shutting down the process at Sparsh BPO's Thane center.

Low sales and high costs were the main reason for the switch of the process from Sparsh to vCustomer.  It seems that Transamerica is quite satisfied with its new partner in India. Apparently, vCustomer is a very open, employee friendly BPO/KPO with management involving their juniors in most aspects of the organization. Sparsh BPO was billing the client approximately Rs 22,000 per seat per month plus telecom costs. If Sparsh had retained this 45 billable seats process they would have added nearly over a crore to their topline.

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