BSNL: Switch from Sparsh to Spanco
By Bala Shah

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 On April 9, 2010, Techgoss had exclusively reported on how Indian telecom major Aircel had withdrawn its call centre services being done by Sparsh.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.

Now, Spanco has won another of Sparsh’s existing clients.

On Aug 11, 2010, a source at BSNL Corp HQ contacted Techgoss to tell us that one of their key Inbound Customer Care Process being run by Sparsh, Pune has been moved to Spanco BPO offices at New Bombay. This process caters to the western region's customers located in and including Maharashtra, Gujarat, Goa etc.

According to our Tipster, the loss of this process will result in Sparsh having to let go as many as 300 employees and associated support staff. This is one of the largest processes Sparsh BPO has across India and the western region was one of the important customer care processes,

It is said that originally BSNL was Spanco's client and the process was moved into Sparsh BPO's books before it was taken over by Intelenet which is backed by Blackstone. Keen to get back lost ground, Spanco has taken back this important process. According to sources in BSNL, the difference between Sparsh's tender and Spanco's tender was very very marginal, almost to the last divisible currency number and in the units of a decimal figure.

Recently, Sparsh BPO Services has promoted Bharat Melwani as the new head for all government accounts.