vCustomer, a leading provider of tech support and business process outsourcing, will open a new 1,000-seat call centre in Pune in the next one-and-a-half months.

At an investment of $5 million, the centre will be spread over an area of 75,000 sq feet and will service about nine clients of the company.

"The best part of the Pune centre is that every seat is already spoken for. So once the centre opens we will reach the full capacity of 1,000 seats within the next seven months," says Sanjay Kumar, CEO, vCustomer Corp.

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Founded in 1999 by Kumar, vCustomer handles over 3.5 million calls a month, making it one of the largest voice contact support services firm in India.

vCustomer is hiring aggressively for its Pune centre, recruiting over 300 people every month in the last two months. With the new centre, vCustomer will have 3,000-seats on offer, 2,000 being in New Delhi where its other three call centres are located.

"The challenge today is in the hiring. Getting agents who are good and be able to ramp up quickly without compromising on agent quality is a key thing for companies. Retention and hiring are the biggest issues today," says Kumar.

Like many other call centres, Kumar says vCustomer too is exploring the idea of moving to smaller cities or Tier-2 cities that will offer it access to a larger talent pool without significantly increasing the costs.

vCustomer is also scouting for acquisitions in the United States. It is looking at acquiring a company in the US with revenues between $25 and $50 million.

"We are sitting on cash reserves close to $25 million. We would like to acquire a private firm in the US with a strong client base and can take decisions quickly. We hope to close on something in the next six months," says Kumar.

Kumar hopes that the acquisition will provide vCustomer strong growth in revenues and present a 'more global face' of the company.

Even as protests against outsourcing continue with unions in the UK upping their protests and the US elections around the corner, Kumar says that the backlash does not overtly bother him.

"We don't see the backlash being an issue that large corporations are paying that much attention to. The US government does not tell private corporations what to do and government outsourcing contracts as than one percent of the contracts outsourced to India," says Kumar.

In the last few months accent training and quality have become major issues for Indian companies. In December 2003, computer giant Dell and financial services major Lehmann Brothers had hinted that customers were unhappy with the accents of agents at Indian call centres.

Kumar says that call centres need to re-look their accent training programs and be firm on quality issues even in the face of pressures from the customers.

Agents at vCustomer undergo mandatory training of two weeks before they are put on the floor and have training sessions of two hours every week to make sure they get the voice and accent perfect.

Profiling and picking the right agents for a job is also important, says Kumar.

"Call centres need to make sure they get the profile of the agents right and they do not lose quality when they try to scale up. Companies should not get pressurized by clients. They need to push back if need be, but ensure they keep up quality standards all the time," he says.