The Hindu Business Line : Nortel, Bharti sign 5-year services deal

Bharti Tele-Ventures has signed a five-year managed services agreement with Nortel to host contact centre services for more than 19.7 million Airtel subscribers.

As part of the agreement, Nortel will create a Network Operations Centre (NOC) in New Delhi and provide network design, integration, support and maintenance services for Bharti's contact centre architecture.

A 24x7 voice portal based on Nortel's interactive voice response (IVR) solution will be the cornerstone of Bharti's new contact centre operation. Once the project is implemented, Airtel users can dial a single number from anywhere in India, to be able to speak in English, Hindi, or four other regional languages to complete routine transactions and subscribe to new services while the system interacts with them in a natural, conversational manner.

Nortel has also designed the architecture for future interactive video response capability.

Assist BPO vendors

Nortel will also assist Bharti's strategic business process outsourcing (BPO) vendors — TeleTech Services, Hinduja TMT, IBM Daksh and MphasiS — in identifying customer needs. Nortel has already deployed more than 6,000 agent stations for these centres.

Bharti has designed with Nortel an innovative `per call' approach to pay for Nortel's hosted services, linking its contact centre cost structure to network traffic, service levels and customer growth.

"Bharti's objective is to differentiate itself in India's highly competitive communications environment by ensuring customer delight through personalised customer service, and accomplishing this through a highly cost-effective business model," said Dr Jai Menon, Director, IT and Innovation, Bharti Tele-Ventures.

The Nortel solution also includes virtualisation of the contact centre infrastructure, technology for call forecasting, call routing, call prioritisation, multimedia, unified messaging, and IP-enabled video.

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Nortel, Bharti sign 5-year services deal