| Good
times calling for International Call centres as
DoT permits interconnection |
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The
Department of Telecommunications (D.O.T) has recently
permitted the use of common infrastructure for domestic
and international call centres. Reputed companies
with an annual turnover of above $110 mn or a combined
turnover of promoters that exceeds $ 230 mn, can
now use the same equipment, switches and bandwidth
that they employ to service clients say in the US
and UK to cater to domestic customers in the day
time.
Earlier,
the government objected to permitting a call centre
handling international calls to tap the domestic
market. The underlying belief was that since such
call centre companies are allowed to import hardware
duty-free, they should not be allowed to use the
systems for domestic jobs. Moreover, there government
feared that some call centres could start misusing
the linkage between the IPLC and the public-switched
telephone network (PSTN) to route non-business long-distance
calls for domestic customers. |
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Our Say |
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| The
policy changes would permit Indian call
centres to offer a diversified service
portfolio, that reduces the cost of
infrastructure and increases shift utilisation.
The new policy would also help to reduce
attrition levels in the industry as
agents can be shifted between day and
night shifts. All in all the changes
will help Indian BPOs become internationally
competitive as such policies already
exist in countries like Philippines,
China and Malaysia.
Also,
the global practices and customer service
delivery processes that Indian agents
are picking up, can be used for the
benefit of the Indian consumer. By specifying
the turnover of the companies that would
be allowed such common facilities, the
government has tried to keep only credible
players in and avoid the misuse of long-distance
calls. |
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The
government’s move will now provide greater
returns on investment (RoI) for companies that invested
in international call centres, but were prohibited
from using the facilities for the benefit of domestic
clients.
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| India
could soon be a global Research & development
hub |
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India
is set to be the globe’s research and development
hub with more than 100 companies from across the
globe having set up their research centres in India
in the past five years. Among these, the biggest
would be GE’s centre at Bangalore whose staff
strength will soon increase to around 2,400, from
the present 1,600, making it the second largest
research and development centre of the company in
the world.
India's
research and development potential comes from its
over 250 universities, 1,500 research and development
units, engineering colleges and the world's largest
chains of publicly funded research and development
institutions, all of which remained under-utilised. |
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Our Say |
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| Innovations
are starting to have multiple geographical
and organisational sources of technology,
with increasingly differentiated and
innovation-specific patterns of diffusion.
Research and development in high technology
industries- like biotechnology, microelectronics,
pharmaceuticals, information technology
and new materials- have become highly
technical. India’s competitive
advantage lies in these high-technology
businesses, which in turn would depend
increasingly on underlying technical
skills of the organisation rather than
on particular products.
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Added
to this is the fact that several leading enterprises
around the world are eager to build innovation platforms
through multi-sourcing of innovations. The trend
is also being fuelled by the shortage of research
and development personnel in these countries. Companies,
therefore, have to bridge the demand-supply gap
in skills by outsourcing, thus obtaining high-quality
engineers, scientists and designers. |
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