Country's largest private telecom operator Bharti Airtel has signed a three-year outsourcing contract with BPO services provider Firstsource Solutions for providing voice and back office services to its 66 million mobile customers.     

Under the deal, valued at $35 million, Firstsource would supply a suite of BPO services, which covers up both voice and back office in fields including customer accounting, VAS provisioning, fraud and credit monitoring, customer service, collections, customer retention and from its centres in Chennai and Mumbai.  

While company didn’t disclose the financial details, sources told that the deal was valued at around $35 million.

Firstsource will establish centres in Vashi, New Bombay and Chennai from Airtel. Moreover, it anticipates having more than 1,000 employees during the initial year focused on providing services in English and 8 other regional languages to Airtel’s clients.

Previously, Bharti outsourced its telecom managed services with Nokia in a $400 million agreement and had also outsourced IT services with IBM in an estimated $700-$750 million deal.     

In August 2005, Bharti announced a Rs 1,000-crore deal with BPO firms such as Aegis, Firstsource, Hinduja TMT (HTMT), IBM Daksh, Mphasis and Teleperformance to outsource its call centre operations.

The recent deal with Firstsource is another instance of the company’s policy to focus on its core areas of product innovation, marketing and brand building.

Shares of Bharti Airtel, on Wednesday (May 21) declined 0.74% to settle at Rs 822.65 on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE). The total volume of shares traded was 354,874.