Chennaibest.com speaks to Jagadish Ramamoorthy, Director and CEO, Allsec Technologies Limited about the first multimedia call centre in Chennai.

Allsec is basically not one of its kind, but what we are trying is to make a whole industry transition to India. We are talking of Indian call centres. The advantage of Indian call centres is that we are talking of a very large scale of trained manpower which is available in India, which can be used to man call centres. If you take call centres in USA, we are talking of agents who are basically high school drop-outs who can't really do any written communication, all they can do is they can talk based on the script available in the PC. Here we are talking of a set of agents who are graduates, who are trained in computers, who are easily trainable on the products as well. Today call centres have more complicated uses like technical support for hardware and software products, things like these which no US call centre can really handle. That's the value-addition we are offering. Functionally, it is one of its kind in South India today, where we are talking of a multimedia call centre, where we can offer voice, email and web services.

There are about 1,00,000 call centres in the US today, employing around 9 million people, so these are the number of seats waiting to get converted. Apart from the US, we are also looking at Europe, Australia and South-East Asia.

Two years ago, we couldn't even switch the call from the US to India without a time lag, at inexpensive prices. But today, because of laying optical fibres, we can switch calls without any delay and at comparatively inexpensive prices. This has changed the market. Improvements will happen continuously. Even today its quite expensive. Voice over cannot be exploited commercially today. We are in the technology business, and we will have keep ourselves up-to-date to survive.

Our training programme lasts for about 4 to 5 weeks. We give multi-layered training. We start with agent development, where stress is layed upon phonettiquette, netettiquette etc. Then we give them accent training, they may have to speak to people from various countries, they are taught to modify their accent accordingly. Then we train them on how to handle technology (how to handle calls, e-mail, multiple chats, navigate between screens etc)

We have an NDA with the client, and also with our employees. Apart from that we have firewall and passwords, backup storage facilities and in terms of physical security we have put access controls in place.

The awareness is there. What with Ford putting up its IT centre at the Tidel Park and various other IT-related activities happening in Chennai, a number of multinational companies are looking at Chennai as an investment destination. Basically Chennaiites are not aggressive, they can be easily trained. Traditionally they are hard working, knowledge-oriented and the quality of service they give is fairly good.

Call centre as a business has a lot of scope for development. This business can support any industry that involves corporate communication. Its like a paper clip, which can be applied anywhere. So, we are not planning to get into any other activity, not atleast for the next two to three years. We may go in for further expansion, increase seats etc. but currently, we are focussing only on this call centre.

|