Bharti pulls in networking players in hosting contact center

A consortium of Bharti Airtel, Cisco, and Servion today announced its foray into the Indian hosted Contact Center services market – valued at $50 million – with the launch of Hosted Contact Center (HCC) services.

This HCC offering for large, medium, and small enterprises offers freedom from technology obsolescence, capital investments, and continuity challenges while leveraging the capability to customize the product based on business requirements. The consortium aims to acquire 5000 ports / seats in the first year.
With capital expense budgets shrinking, organizations are seeking ever more innovative approaches to achieve their goals. HCC claims to offer access to technology without having to buy software licenses, hardware, building infrastructure, or dedicating IT resources to implementing, maintaining and upgrading the technologies. That can mean plenty of cost savings and flexibility.
HCC also believes its services are faster and less expensive to implement than customer premise-based Contact Centers, and require no ongoing capital equipment or maintenance fee investment.
Milan Rao, CEO of Enterprise Services at Bharti Airtel, said “this alliance is in line with our philosophy to partner with industry leaders. We are committed to offer state-of-the-art solutions that enhance productivity and minimize costs for our customers. There is a great potential for Call Center solutions over a hosted platform as it promises huge benefits for enterprises across different verticals”.
K. Balakrishnan, Managing Director and CEO of Servion Global Solutions said “The consortium combines the best of three worlds – reach and brand of Bharti Airtel communication network, technology leadership of Cisco, and domain expertise and integration capabilities of Servion in offering a tailor made hosted Contact Center solution to the enterprise customer.”
“The tough economic climate has brought about the need for innovative solutions and consumption models and the hosted contact center model is a great example of one. Cisco, Bharti Airtel and Servion are coming together today to offer a truly transformational solution that factors in the vital business imperatives of agility and scale, in times like this,” said Vikram Sharma, Head – Managed Services, Cisco India & SAARC.
In addition to the features that are available for any high end premise based Contact Center solution – self-service, inbound, outbound, and international conferencing capabilities, the HCC solution offers the domain expertise to customize applications, performance monitoring, infrastructure, skill sets, technology adoption and financial investments.