Cara Consultants, STI Knowledge join hands
By value-addition will go towards mak | 08 Sep 2001
Pune: Cara Consultants has tied up with STI Knowledge, a US-based certification agency, to set up a customer contact training and certification programme in the country. The programme is aimed at generating a pool of trained and certified professionals for call centres and help desks.
Though the call centre business is making rapid inroads into the Indian market, it is still at a nascent stage. There is a tremendous future in this business in the backdrop of the rapid development of communication technology that makes remote processing possible. India's abundant resource of English-speaking manpower, low-wage structure and its unique time-zone position - with a 12-hour time difference with the US and six-to-seven hours with most European markets - makes it the ideal location to run a 24-hour service.
Industry estimates put the number of call centres worldwide at 1,00,000, which is expected to treble by 2002. By 2003, a total of 60 billion dollars is expected to be spent on remote processing, call centres, back office operations, data conversion and financial accounting.
In view of the vast potential, STI Knowledge, which has entered the Indian market through Cara Consultants, plans to roll out these training and certification programmes in the four metropolises and Gurgaon, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Pune.
Cara-STI Knowledge will offer a comprehensive suite of products and services with every component required for building and operating a successful call centre or help desk. “These would include best practices, methodologies, and the most successful management strategies used in call centres worldwide,“ says Cara-STI Knowledge director Dr Shashi Khanna.
The differentiating factor of the STI Knowledge programme is that while most programmes limit their training to front-line professionals who man the call centres, STI-Knowledge focuses equally on the directors and managers of the call centre businesses, since it believes that an integrated involvement is necessary to make these support centres truly responsive to customers' queries.
“The intention is to value-add to the fast-growing call centre and help desk industry in India,“ says Pete McGarahan, chief marketing officer of STI Knowledge, who was in Pune to announce the tie-up. “Such value-addition will go towards making the call centres into knowledge centres and one-stop access centres for customers, and drive profitability and revenue for the organisation. “
