Lankan Cos. to invest heavily this year in back office, call centre

Providence Network, the IT subsidiary of St. Anthony’s Group, has joined up with Parsec Technologies of India, to launch a pioneering outsourcing venture in Sri Lanka. The company said in a statement that this initiative will boost the rapidly-expanding outsourcing industry in the island, resulting in the creation of new employment opportunities and attracting much needed foreign exchange.

The joint venture, the statement added, will deliver the full range of call centre solutions for telemarketing, debt collections, market survey and other outbound and inbound applications.

“The success of PARSEC revolves around its core technology of a total outbound call centre solution along with inbound call handling capabilities equipped with a campaign management system for tele-marketing, a collection management system for collections, digital voice recording, a comprehensive lead management system, advanced conferencing and sales verification system and exhaustive analytics in the form of online and off-line business reports,” the local company said.

Managing Director of Providence Network Dr. Vaz Gnanam pointed out that Sri Lanka is ranked among the top 10 outsourcing call centre hubs in the world according to a recent article in Voice & Data (Nov 07) issue. He foresees call centre operations playing a major role in our economy.

Among the advantages Sri Lanka possesses in this industry is the relatively low labour/operational costs, tax incentives, fluency in English and its cosmopolitan attitude. “The key factors for survival in the call centre business are good software, good data mining, good agents and good processes,” noted Dr. Vaz. He also said that the PARSEC – Providence joint venture will offer end-to-end solutions with the complete infrastructure.

Manager-Business Development, PARSEC Technologies, Ankur Khurana said there is much scope in the Asian region for call centre operations, adding that they have entered into technical alliances with such international communication technology giants as Intel, CISCO, HP and dialogic Corporation. The company also supplies and supports the latest dialogic products to customers across the globe.

PARSEC, headquartered near the capital city of India, is one of the oldest and most popular technology provider for call centres in India. The company is rapidly gaining a reputation in many countries including the Philippines, Sri Lanka, UAE and Pakistan for its innovative technology.

For this Sri Lankan venture, the bandwidth and other support services will be provided by Lanka Communication Services whose Managing Director Rohith Udalagama said would provide hardware as well if required, and will partner with Providence Network to provide the necessary infrastructure. “We believe 2008 is the year that many Sri Lankan companies will invest heavily into back office processing and call centre solutions,” said Jeevan Gnanam, Jt. Managing Director of Providence Network and Solutions (Pvt) Ltd.