Dell Inc. is setting up a third customer contact center in India, in the Chandigarh metro area in the north of the country, the company announced Wednesday. Operations at the center are likely to begin by March next year with about 300 employees.

"We will start with technical support for our U.S. customers at the center initially and later get into sales as well," said Kithane Narahari, a spokesman for Dell India.

Dell, of Round Rock, Texas, opened its first global customer contact center in Bangalore in 2001, initially providing technical support for customers in the U.S. Dell set up another customer contact center in Hyderabad last year.

Last year Dell had stopped routing to India technical calls from some corporate customers, relating to some of its product lines, because of complaints from customers about poor quality of service, according to reports.

"We now do both sales and technical support out of Hyderabad and Bangalore for customers around the world, and that includes corporate customers too," said Narahari, who would not comment on the reports.

The company has also set up a product group team in Bangalore, focused on development and testing of Dell's enterprise line of server and storage products, and a software development center to meet Dell's internal information systems requirements.

Although Dell will not disclose the number of people employed at its two customer support centers in Hyderabad and Bangalore, the company has over 6,000 staff working on customer contact at these two locations, according to informed sources.

Faced with a shortage of good quality staff in large cities such as Bangalore, Mumbai, and Hyderabad, a number of multinational and local companies are exploring the option of setting up their call centers and business process outsourcing (BPO) operations in smaller towns. The potential for hiring good staff in Chandigarh is very good as it has a large pool of English speaking people, Narahari said.

IDG News Service

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