Snapdeal holds preliminary talks with BPOs to outsource call centre

MUMBAI: Snapdeal has begun preliminary talks with BPO providers to outsource its call centre, two people with knowledge of the discussions said, as the ecommerce company looks to scale up customer support to match sales growth.

Snapdeal previously ran its call centre in-house. The company is now looking at a hybrid strategy ” in-house and outsourced agents ” to manage customer service.

“As operations get larger, it is very hard to scale customer support internally and it is not core to their business. So they have had preliminary discussions to outsource part of the call centre,” a person with knowledge of the discussions said.

The person said Snapdeal would likely retain its customer service employees in-house, though rebadging is possible. In an IT-BPO deal, rebadging implies some employees could move to the firm fulfilling the IT contract. Industry experts estimate Snapdeal’s parent company – Jasper Infotech – has over 200 customer service agents working for it.

Snapdeal had not responded to a request for comment on outsourcing plans at the time of going to press.

The move comes about a year after rival Flipkart began to outsource its customer support, as ET has previously reported. Flipkart, too, went for a hybrid structure.

Interestingly, in December, Snapdeal hired Dharmarajan K as head of customer experience. He was hired from Flipkart, where he was senior director of customer service and was part of the decision-making team that oversaw the company’s call-centre outsourcing plans.

“It’s early stages (talks), but a good sign for domestic BPO business. Ecommerce will be the next growth sector,” a senior executive with a BPO company told ET. He declined to be identified because discussions are private and could hurt his company’s chances of winning a mandate.

Domestic outsourcing has been struggling over the past few years as its major clients ” telecom companies ” have been looking at ways to cut costs on their outsourcing deals. Ecommerce players are also increasingly tapping BPOs. Other than Flipkart, Amazon India has outsourced a call centre serving its merchants, ET reported earlier.

“You need to have a certain scale before you can think of outsourcing functions like a call centre because you need to have a chunk of business to take to a large provider to get them to work on your project,” Arvind Singhal, chairman of management consulting company Technopak, told ET earlier this week.