Spanco to invest Rs 400 cr in BPO biz

Spanco Telesystems and Solutions is poised to invest over Rs 400 crore in its Indian business process outsourcing (BPO) operations, over two years.

The company plans to set up facilities across cities including Chennai, Jaipur, Mysore, Ahmedabad, Lucknow and Noida.

The company today announced its foray into the domestic BPO market. Spanco has set up two flagship customer support centres, one each in Gurgaon and Mumbai, to provide back office and contact centre services to domestic clients.

The company is looking to service industries such as financial services, insurance, telecom, entertainment, retail and hospitality in India.

Spanco's new centres will be spread over 2 lakh square feet with a capacity of 2,200 seats. The company aims to increase the capacity to 15,000 seats with over 25,000 employees by financial year 2009.

In its first phase of the expansion, Spanco's BPO arm is expected to employ around 5,000 employees. The company currently employs over 3,000 people in its BPO.

Commenting on Spanco's entry into the domestic BPO space, Sandeep Soni, executive director and chief executive officer, Spanco BPO, said, "We believe this is the best time to enter the domestic BPO market, given the huge emerging opportunities within the country. Given Spanco's erstwhile experience in the domestic space and proven technology competency, we will seek to differentiate ourselves by providing complete BPO and end-to-end strategic outsourcing solutions for organisations in India."

Spanco BPO has set up call centres for many government enterprises including BSNL and MTNL.

Key services at the BPO include outbound and inbound sales, customer service and collections as well as back-office functions such as e-mail response.

Spanco also has an international call centre with a presence in India, the UK and West Asia.