India operations still important for Lloyds TSB

Llyods TSB Group, one of the biggest provider of consumer loans in UK, has maintained that the India operations remain important for it despite the fact that it has stopped its phone banking operations handled out of its Mumbai centre. The announcement is expected to affect 100-150 people who handled phone calls in India.

The company, in an e-mail response to a Business Standard query, said: "Operations in India remain an important part of Lloyds TSB Group strategy. Over the next few weeks, the few remaining staff will transfer to other roles within the same centre. There will be no redundancies as a result of this shift in work."

There were reports in the media that the company bowed to pressure from four lakh customers who signed a petition against outsourced customer service operations. Denying this, the company said: "It has been as a result of advances in technology as outlined in our statement. The number of calls has been steadily falling since we introduced interactive voice response (IVR) in August 2006. As a result, we have needed fewer and fewer staff to handle incoming calls. As this has been happening, we have been retraining staff in Mumbai and moving them to other Lloyds TSB work."

Sally Jones-Evans, managing director, telephone banking said in a press release: "In the past, calls went through to our Mumbai contact centre when all our other 10 UK centres were busy. We have seen a huge increase in the number of customers using our new automated service, which means the number of overflow calls going into Mumbai has been steadily reducing. It has now got the point that all calls are being comfortably handled by our staff in the UK."