Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), which is entrusted with the job, had invited tenders from consortia, including a telecom firm with pan-Indian operations and business process outsourcing (BPO) firm, to set up and operate Railways' call centres.
Railways receives about 14-15 lakh phone calls a day for various queries; it generates substantial revenues for the telecom firm in whose network the enquiry number resides, as it gets the termination charges.
The call centre would have to provide basic train enquiry services at the cost of a local call for passengers calling from anywhere in the country.But it can have premium pricing for value-added services such as hotel booking. About 25 firms have bought the tender document, said sources. They include telecom majors such as Airtel, BSNL, Reliance Infocomm and Tata Teleservices. Players from the IT/BPO sector who have evinced interest include Avaya Global Connect, CMC, HP, IBM, Wipro, MphasiS BFL, HCL Comnet, HCL Infosys, Spanco Telesystems and Intelenet Global Services. Moreover, there are companies such as Jupiter Strategic Technologies, Pagepoint Services, CS Infocomm, Stracon, Matrix Processing House, Cranium Information Technology and IMI Software.
