Spanco BPO Ventures Limited (SBVL) is the holding company of Spanco Limited’s BPO entities. SBVL’s operations are spread across India, the Middle East, the US, the UK and Africa. The company offers a wide spectrum of services such as call centre operations, building and managing call and data centre infrastructure, and global manpower outsourcing.

SBVL recognised the need to upgrade its traditional communications infrastructure to one that facilitated feature-rich applications as well as seamless connectivity. The network upgradation was undertaken keeping in mind the organisation’s twin goals of maintaining a leadership position in both the Indian information technology (IT) and IT-enabled services market as well as ensuring business continuity.

tele.net traces the development of SBVL’s IT and telecom set-up…

Legacy system 

According to Pravin Kumar, chief executive officer, SBVL, the BPO does not have a legacy system as such  because it keeps updating its systems from time to time as per the industry standard.

“Our systems are relatively new (not more than two years old),” says Kumar, “with all patches, upgrades as well as updates in place.”

Existing infrastructure 

According to Kumar, technology is an integral part of SBVL’s communication-related activities. “Our clients are constantly adopting newer and better technologies and devices such as 3G and smartphones, which facilitate easy communication through email, chat and video while on the go,” he says.

The company’s current communication infrastructure was set up with the aim of keeping pace with its clients. According to Kumar, “All our technology selections are based on what is next and next is what.”

The company deployed next-generation technology platforms sourced from Avaya, Aspect, Cisco and Nortel to support its clients’ requirements.

These platforms are independent and can be integrated as per requirement. SBVL’s facilities are also installed with multiplexers, last mile technologies, the internet and multi-protocol label switching-based technology architecture sourced from service providers like Tata Communications, Reliance Communications, Spectranet, Bharti airtel, Aircel and Tulip Technologies.

The company also provides customer relationship management (CRM) applications such as Talisma. This application is integrated with SMS, email, payment gateways, mobile applications for on-the-go connectivity, where a unified solution is provided through a single application.

The company’s in-house CRM has developed many contact centre and enterprise applications, including employee self-service, human resource management solutions, warehouse management, inventory management, business-to-business and business-to-customer services, an intranet portal and business intelligence solution.

Implementation challenges 

The company faced a number of challenges in implementation, particularly while integrating different technologies from vendors and providing the final solution to customers.

For example, one of the company’s clients in the banking, financial services and insurance segment developed a proprietary application that did not allow integration with the BPO’s core banking solution owing to security reasons. According to Kumar, a lot of time was spent by the company’s agents in copying the contact details displayed on the telephony application. This was a challenging task as mistakes in copying these details could have resulted in major errors.

To overcome these challenges, SBVL built an application that runs as middleware, integrating neither with telephony nor with a proprietary client application, seamlessly transferring the data collected from the BPO to the client application.

This helped the company maintain business continuity.  “We could continue to offer on-demand, platform-independent services to our clients,” says Kumar.

Going forward, the company is working towards providing innovative solutions for anticipated customer requirements. These solutions include video, mobile-based solutions, cloud-based services, SAAS and IAAS. 

Therefore, SBVL’s strategy to upgrade its communication network to industry standards has provided it the benefits of a flexible and scalable infrastructure.