Airtel, Firstsource in $35 million outsourcing deal

MUMBAI: Bharti Airtel has signed a $35 million, three-year outsourcing agreement with BPO services provider Firstsource Solutions, which will offer both voice and backoffice services to India's largest telecom operator.

���Firstsource will provide a suite of BPO services covering both voice and backoffice in areas such as customer accounting, VAS provisioning, fraud and credit monitoring, customer service, collections and customer retention to Airtel from its centres in Chennai and Mumbai,��� the company said in a statement in Mumbai.

While company officials declined to provide financial details, sources said the deal was valued at around $35 million. In August 2005, Bharti had announced a Rs 1,000-crore deal with BPO firms IBM Daksh, MphasiS, TeleTech and Hinduja TMT to outsource its call centre operations. The Firstsource deal is another instance of the company's strategy to focus on its core areas of product innovation, marketing, brand building.

Airtel has already outsourced its IT requirements to IBM and cellular networking operations of Nokia and Ericsson. However, the contract with Firstsource is more comprehensive as it includes mobile collection, welcome calling, VAS provisioning besides other services.