BT and Xansa in Indian BPO call centre systems deal

IT services firm Xansa has signed a five-year deal with BT to use its hosted front-end call centre system for its business process outsourcing (BPO) operations in India and the UK.

The system is due to go live and it could potentially be used across the 10,000-seat contact centre capacity that Xansa is aiming to build in India by 2007.

Xansa will use BT's Agile Contact Central, part of the firm's Siebel-based customer relationship management portfolio, which is hosted from the UK on a 'pay as you go' basis and integrates all Xansa's front-end call centre channels.

Neill Phillips, business development director at Xansa told silicon.com that the deal will boost Xansa's offering to its BPO customers.

"It gives considerable benefits to our clients. This will give us greater flexibility for our clients as they need to grow. It gives us the ability to easily integrate voice and data with our clients. Our solutions do need to have an element of voice in them," he said.

Xansa currently uses a number of solutions in this area, including other offerings from BT, but Phillips said the pay as you go model offers more flexibility to add or scale down the number of contact centre agents according to customer demand.

"We needed something flexible and scalable so someone on our service desk gets voice and data immediately over an IP network instead of a fixed-line one," he said.

Paul White, at BT, said the offering cuts out the cost of using a systems integrator to join all the individual bits together as well as having a secure connection.

"What we've got is a dedicated VPN that connects the hosting infrastructure with the call centre environment," he said.