BT to cut 2,000 jobs

London/Bengaluru
July 16: British telecom giant BT will transfer more than 2,000 call centre jobs from India back to the UK, the chief executive, Mr Ian Livingston, revealed during the firm’s annual general meeting at the Barbican Centre in London.
BT will transfer at least 2,000 jobs to Britain from India, where it employs 11,000 customer service staff. However, the eventual number of job cuts in call centres will be closer to 2,750, representing half the group’s 5,500 call-centre staff in India, the Times reported on Thursday.
The firm, however, insisted that its move had nothing to do with the quality of service offered in India. “This is not about customer service, as the service in our operations around the globe is of very similar standards. It is about the effective deployment of our resou-rces. We have opportunities to bring some activities, carried out by our partners, back from outside the UK to permanent BT employees in the UK who are skilled to do this work,” a company spokesperson said.
The pullout of jobs from India would be phased with no specific timescale set for the transfer of jobs. “This is part of a long-term strategy to reduce costs and the dependency on third parties globally,” the spokesperson added.
Industry watchers in Bengaluru said the move would keep the local population, struggling with a deep recession, happy. Unemployment in the United Kingdom is at its highest in the last one decade and salaries have dropped — so has India’s cost advantage.
The managing partner of consulting firm Browne & Mohan, Dr T.R. Madan Mohan, says that while Indian companies charge about $18 per resource, in the UK charges have dropped to $22-23 per resource from $33 in December last year.
“However, technology work, which requires high skills, may continue to be outsourced. BT had axed 6000 jobs last year in the United Kingdom and much of this work came to Tech Mahindra and HCL,” Mr Mohan says.