Telecom network operator BT has announced plans to close down its call centers in Bangalore and Delhi in India, in a bid to bring them back to Britain.
It seems BT took the decision to shift call centers, which address customer issues, to Britain follows customer feedback. BT users want to talk to a call center in the U.K. and not in India. The PTI article does not reveal whether the decision was pertaining to BT users’ inability to talk to Indians and solve their issues.
The telecom giant, which is competing against EE and Vodafone in the U.K. telecom market, has said that more than 80 percent of calls will be answered in the U.K. by the end of 2016, and that it will go further in years to come, PTI reported.
“Our customers have told us that they would prefer to speak to a contact centre in the U.K. when they call us,” said John Petter, chief executive of BT Consumer.
“When we launched BT Mobile earlier this year we located customer service in the U.K. and our customers have valued that. We think doing this for our other products is one way in which we can boost the service that we offer customers,” Petter said.
BT said it offshore partners have provided a good level of service. However, BT believes that now is the right time to commit more investment to the UK and that this is something customers will appreciate.
Incidentally, BT is facing significant regulatory challenges from British telecom regulator Ofcom.
Since 2003, the firm, which has more than 10 million customers in the UK, has used call centres in Bangalore and Delhi to supplement its UK operations, according to the Guardian.
Currently half of BT’s customer calls are dealt with at centres in the UK.
The firm will continue to outsource back-office work and functions that do not involve frontline work of taking customers’ calls offshore and those jobs will most likely stay in India.
BT said it has already created more than 1,000 new UK jobs to meet this commitment, and plans to create “hundreds of other customer call centre positions in the UK over the next year“.
The company has 20 contact centres in the UK from Wales and Cornwall to the Midlands and Scotland.
Telecom customers have long complained of poor customer service with staff unable to sort out basic problems.
