Netrique to up local headcount

THE IT VALLEY - PART V

Montreal-based contact service centre company Netrique International Inc, with operations in Canada and Malaysia, recently set up its third centre at Creative Infocity in Gandhinagar.

Netrique India, a subsidiary of Netrique International Inc, plans to invest Rs 2.5 crore in Gujarat, to build up a workforce of 150 persons by the year end.

"We will use the Gandhinagar centre to take up tasks such as market research, lead generation, product sales and statistical surveys. Already operational, the set-up here has 45 persons, which will be scaled up to 150 by the year end," said Darshan Patel, chief executive officer, Netrique India. Patel said all these tasks will be done for clients in the US, but he declined to disclose the names.

Netrique has experience in areas such as communication, marketing, human resource development, software development and hi-tech manufacturing.

"We want to be the first choice when clients choose to outsource their contact centre services, and we will validate their confidence in us by augmenting their business results through services that promote customer loyalty and expand their customer base," Patel said.

He said Netrique is capable of managing outsourced customer sales and support applications that allow firms to acquire new customers and manage and hike the value of existing customers. The company has established contact centres in North America, India and south-east Asia.

Some of the services that Netrique offers are interactive voice response (IVR), a telephony technology in which someone uses a touch-tone telephone to interact with a database to acquire information from or enter data into the database. Besides, the company offers hosted contact centre solutions.

"A comprehensive CRM plan requires a sophisticated technology infrastructure that is flexible, scalable, and adaptable. The rapid pace of change in technology and CRM strategies makes it difficult to build and maintain a technology platform. Netrique provides hosted contact centre solutions that provide sophisticated technologies available today," said Patel.

On the decision to set up the Gujarat centre, Patel said he came to India and surveyed almost all major cities.

"I was speaking to a MLA in Navsari, who later introduced me to the state chief minister. Subsequently, I saw the facilities at Infocity, and decided to set up the call centre here," Patel said.

He said another reason that prompted him to set up the centre in Gujarat is that the call centre personnel in the state are far more stable than those of other states.

"People here tend to stay with a company longer than in other places like Bangalore, Delhi, Mumbai or Pune," he said.

Patel said the infrastructure facilities at Infocity, combined with other advantages, made him choose Gandhinagar as the site for the call centre.