Bharti to outsource customer support for African operations
Bharti Airtel who in recent times outsourced the IT supplies for its Africa operations to IBM, is now close to finalize a deal to outsource its customer support services.
According to sources, if this deal takes place it could be a landmark in the African continent, where customers support is limited and rarely outsourced. Some of Bharti’s existing back-office suppliers in India as well as IT biggies such as Tech Mahindra and IBM are opposing for the contract.
Bharti’s back-office suppliers in India are Firstsource, Aegis and IBM.
According to another source, the bids for back-office services were requested for 15 countries from Firstsource, Aegis, Spanco, IBM and Tech Mahindra. The deal was to be finalized last week but has been delayed. The outsourcing of the back-office operations along with IT will play a key role in making Bharti competitive in Africa, where it has already adopted aggressive customer-acquisition strategies such as lowering of tariffs.
The contract value is expected to be small to start off with — around US$100 to US$ 150 million — and will gradually grow, along with Bharti’s own growth in the African market.
The contract for customer services will be the first of its kind in the African continent where the back-office processing industry is still in the early stages of evolution. In many African countries, the concept of customer service itself is non-existent.
According to an executive with one of the bidders, the Mobile phone penetration in Africa is higher than in India but even in the telecom segment subscribers usually have to go to an outlet if they have query or complaint.
As per the sources, there are no African companies in the fray for Bharti’s contract because the players do not have the scale that Bharti wants. But Bharti is likely to have more than one provider for its back office services similar to what it has in India.
The challenge for the service providers bidding for Bharti’s contract would be a highly fragmented African market and limited knowledge of local market conditions.
Telecom New Zealand in talk for outsourcing contract
www.WirelessFederation.com/news:? A number of companies have been contacted by Telecom Corp of New Zealand Ltd over an outsourcing contract for a large chunk of its technical services. The names of the company have not been disclosed and the worth of the contract is also kept behind the curtains because of the sensitivity.
Reportedly, India’s Tech Mahindra Ltd. and Wipro Ltd. are among companies in discussions with Telecom over the outsourcing contract estimated to be of $1 billion. The company is at the stage of deciding philosophically how it wants to approach the issue as it is a big, long-term strategic decision for the whole business and the development of structure the technology part of the business in a way that it can help the rest of it achieve what it needs to achieve and therefore the decision will not be taken in hurry.
New Zealand’s largest telco by sales and market share has been in turmoil since 2006 when the government decided to bust its effective monopoly by forcing it to open its networks to rivals.
BT in 1 bln usd, five year sourcing deal with Indian subsidiary Tech Mahindra
British Telecom PLC has signed a five year, 1 bln usd plus deal with its 32.6 pct Indian subsidiary Tech Mahindra Ltd to extend its long-standing ‘strategic sourcing services’ from the Indian company.
‘Tech Mahindra will support BTs planned growth of managed services to business customers around the globe and continue to provide ongoing services related to BTs internal systems, processes and re-usable platforms,’ the Indian IT services firm said in a notification to the Bombay Stock Exchange.
The two companies have been working together for two decades.
As of the end of September, BT was the second largest shareholder in the publicly listed company, after the Indian auto and finance major Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd.
