Bharti, Nortel Sign Managed Services Agreement for Contact Center Technology

NEW DELHI, India, March 27 /PRNewswire/ --

- Hosted Services 'Per Call' Pricing to Make Business Simpler

Bharti Tele-Ventures, India's leading provider of telecommunications services, has signed a five-year managed services agreement with Nortel(x) (NYSE: NT; TSX: NT) to host contact center services for more than 19.7 million - and growing - subscribers to Bharti's Airtel GSM mobile, broadband and fixed-line services.

Nortel will create a Network Operations Center (NOC) in New Delhi and provide network design, integration, support and maintenance services for Bharti's contact center architecture.

A 24x7 'virtual storefront' voice portal based on Nortel's interactive voice response (IVR) solution will be the cornerstone of Bharti's new contact center operation. Calling a single number from anywhere in India, Bharti's wireless and wireline customers will be able to speak in English, Hindi, or four other regional languages to complete routine transactions and subscribe to new services while the system interacts with them in a natural, conversational manner. Nortel has also designed the architecture for future interactive video response capability.

To simplify business, Bharti has designed with Nortel an innovative 'per call' approach to paying for Nortel's hosted services, linking its contact center cost structure to network traffic, service levels and customer growth.

"Bharti's objective is to differentiate itself in India's highly competitive communications environment by ensuring customer delight through personalized customer service, and accomplishing this through a highly cost- effective business model," said Dr. Jai Menon, director, IT and Innovation, Bharti Tele-Ventures. "We found the right technology provider to team up with in Nortel, a worldwide leader in IVR technology with a proven track record in contact center innovation for more than 30 years."

"Throughout our close collaboration with Bharti in designing this project, we have focused on meeting its business objectives with the best available technology and services," said Ashoka Valia, managing director, India, Nortel. "Providing a fresh approach and an enhanced level of customer care, as measured through the satisfaction of Bharti's customers, is our joint objective."

The Nortel solution also includes virtualization of the contact center infrastructure, world-class technology for call forecasting, call routing, call prioritization, multimedia, unified messaging, and IP-enabled video.

Complex customer service requests requiring individual attention will be forwarded to appropriate agents in contact centers operated by four of Bharti's strategic business process outsourcing (BPO) vendors - TeleTech Services, Hinduja TMT, IBM Daksh and MphasiS. Nortel has already deployed more than 6,000 agent stations for these centers, all of which are based on Nortel technology.

Nortel's Global Services include a full range of integrated services for design, deployment, management and maintenance of end-to-end multi-vendor network solutions, including seamless migration to next generation technologies.

Nortel has deployed more than 60,000 contact centers and 8,000 self- service solutions worldwide in the last five years. Nortel contact center solutions support an estimated four million agents handling 70 million calls per day. The Nortel self-service portfolio encompasses an advanced suite of scalable self-service platforms to meet the requirements of customers of all sizes - small businesses, large enterprises and service providers. Nortel's complete, turnkey solutions include an IVR portfolio, graphical user interface (GUI) tools, speech technology, and network services. Nortel has designed and deployed over 200 applications in more than 16 countries, according to Frost and Sullivan market research.

About Nortel

Nortel is a recognized leader in delivering communications capabilities that enhance the human experience, ignite and power global commerce, and secure and protect the world's most critical information. Our next-generation technologies, for both service providers and enterprises, span access and core networks, support multimedia and business-critical applications, and help eliminate today's barriers to efficiency, speed and performance by simplifying networks and connecting people with information. Nortel does business in more than 150 countries. For more information, visit Nortel on the Web at www.nortel.com. For the latest Nortel news, visit www.nortel.com/news.

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