Mumbai: Reliance Infocomm is planning to recruit 1,000 call centre agents, in addition to its existing 2,500 staff, to handle an increase in queries as the company is expanding commercial operations to cover a total of 693 towns and cities in the country.

The increase in call centre agents is to handle additional customer queries, which will be mainly on services and products, apart from educating customers on tariffs and schemes," Reliance Infocomm head (integrated customer services) MG Subramaniyam said on September 7.

The company plans to recruit agents with knowledge of either English or Hindi, in addition to any local language, as they require to take calls from across the country, at its centralised call centre at Navi Mumbai, he said.

The agents would be stationed at Dhirubhai Ambani Knowledge City (DAKC), the company's headquarters in Navi Mumbai, and would service Reliance Infocomm's existing products, he said, adding the service would also be extended to newer products.

The agents, who would be "hired for attitude and trained for skills", would also offer services to company's data operations, "R-World", and technical services, 'R-Connect", he said.

The company is also planning to add another 96,000 square feet of floor space to its existing call centre at DAKC to accommodate the additional recruits, he said, adding it operates from a 1.5 lakh square feet area, which can house around 2,100 agents.

Meanwhile, Reliance Infocomm head (call centre) K Chandra said the company is also planning to extend its contact centre-based services in five more Indian languages - Marathi, Punjabi, Bengali, Kannada and Malayalam - in addition to the existing three vernacular languages.

At present, the telecom major provides services in three languages - Gujarati, Tamil and Telugu - apart from that in English and Hindi, he said. This would enable the company to provide customer support to a caller in his mother-tongue, or the language he prefers, as most of the company's customers are common people, he said.

The wireless in local loop (WLL) service provider has both integrated voice response (IVR) and human interface-based operations at its contact center and handles over two lakh calls per day, mostly from metros and North Indian cities.

Reliance Infocomm, which has a presence in over 400 towns and cities in the country, has a customer base of over four million, which is expected to rise to around five million within a couple of months, he said.

The WLL provider is also planning to set up a mirrored call centre to meet any expediency at another geographical location, he said, adding the company is yet to identify the exact place for the back-up centre.

Reliance Infocomm is gearing up its call centre operations to meet Customer Operations Performance Centre (COPC-Gold) requirements, a global certificate for gauging performance, management and quality standards of call and contact centres, Chandra said.

The company expects to complete the process in the next nine to 12 months, he added.

PTI