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Wipro BPO loses Delta Air Lines contract
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Wipro BPO loses Delta Air Lines contract
Wipro BPO has lost its outsourcing contract with Delta Air Lines following negative customer feedback. Delta has been Wipro’s client since 2002.
Spokespersons at Delta, the Atlanta based carrier, have gone on record saying that it has stopped routing customer service calls to India. The move makes Delta the second big carrier to shift customer service work from India after United Airlines did so in February.
“Customer acceptance of call center representatives in other countries was low, and our customers are not shy about letting us have that feedback,” Delta CEO Richard Anderson said in his April 16 message to Delta employees, news agencies reported.
When contacted Wipro’s joint CEO Suresh Vaswani told FC, “While I cannot comment on customer specific information, I can confirm that the economic turbulence in the US has had an impact. It’s a matter of new trends in the demand-supply equation,” Vaswani said, referring to the need for US to get back more jobs into their homeland.
Nasscom president Som Mittal said: "The reason for the pull out could be due to quality or consolidation. At present many companies are looking at consolidation. The US is not so much worried about the offshoring and outsourcing of jobs to India. It is looking at creating some high-end jobs at home".
While the exact size of the Delta-Wipro deal was not immediately known, outsourcing experts told FC that it would be worth $15-30 million a year. “Typically, such outsourcing deals by American airline companies would fetch IT companies close to $150 million over a five year period,” said Sabyasachi Sathyaprasad, founder of Bangalore-based outsourcing advisory firm, Mindplex Partners.
Considering the deal has been on since 2002, Wipro would have raked in close to $200 million by now.
Sathyaprasad said while he saw this incident as an exception, he felt Indian BPOs may have to raise the bar to stay in the hunt. “America is in need of jobs, and if we slip up now, more contracts will be lost,” he said.
Apart from India, Delta has outsourced customer service calls to the Philippines and Jamaica too. Over 6,000 jobs were outsourced to these three counties and more than half of those came to India.
Delta had started outsourcing calls to other countries as travel plunged after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Delta had said previously that moving calls to India saved $25 million a year.
BPO expert and former IT secretary of Karnataka, Vivek Kulkarni, told FC that Indian BPOs may have to start spending more on training. "Indian BPOs will have to look at spending 10 per cent of their billing on training the staff. Presently most of them are spending 5 per cent of the billing. Since they recruit so many freshers, it makes sense to start training candidates at the colleges," he said.
Source:
http://www.mydigitalfc.com/it-enabled-services/wipro-bpo-loses-delta-air-lines-c
Spokespersons at Delta, the Atlanta based carrier, have gone on record saying that it has stopped routing customer service calls to India. The move makes Delta the second big carrier to shift customer service work from India after United Airlines did so in February.
“Customer acceptance of call center representatives in other countries was low, and our customers are not shy about letting us have that feedback,” Delta CEO Richard Anderson said in his April 16 message to Delta employees, news agencies reported.
When contacted Wipro’s joint CEO Suresh Vaswani told FC, “While I cannot comment on customer specific information, I can confirm that the economic turbulence in the US has had an impact. It’s a matter of new trends in the demand-supply equation,” Vaswani said, referring to the need for US to get back more jobs into their homeland.
Nasscom president Som Mittal said: "The reason for the pull out could be due to quality or consolidation. At present many companies are looking at consolidation. The US is not so much worried about the offshoring and outsourcing of jobs to India. It is looking at creating some high-end jobs at home".
While the exact size of the Delta-Wipro deal was not immediately known, outsourcing experts told FC that it would be worth $15-30 million a year. “Typically, such outsourcing deals by American airline companies would fetch IT companies close to $150 million over a five year period,” said Sabyasachi Sathyaprasad, founder of Bangalore-based outsourcing advisory firm, Mindplex Partners.
Considering the deal has been on since 2002, Wipro would have raked in close to $200 million by now.
Sathyaprasad said while he saw this incident as an exception, he felt Indian BPOs may have to raise the bar to stay in the hunt. “America is in need of jobs, and if we slip up now, more contracts will be lost,” he said.
Apart from India, Delta has outsourced customer service calls to the Philippines and Jamaica too. Over 6,000 jobs were outsourced to these three counties and more than half of those came to India.
Delta had started outsourcing calls to other countries as travel plunged after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Delta had said previously that moving calls to India saved $25 million a year.
BPO expert and former IT secretary of Karnataka, Vivek Kulkarni, told FC that Indian BPOs may have to start spending more on training. "Indian BPOs will have to look at spending 10 per cent of their billing on training the staff. Presently most of them are spending 5 per cent of the billing. Since they recruit so many freshers, it makes sense to start training candidates at the colleges," he said.
Source:
http://www.mydigitalfc.com/it-enabled-services/wipro-bpo-loses-delta-air-lines-c