Zia Shiekh

Infowavz, one of the pioneer call centre companies providing customer support, sales and business process management services in India, is gearing up for its third round of funding, due in the next quarter. While the company has already completed its first phase with the establishment of a call centre in Mumbai, setting up data centres in the US and the UK, and a client base of 12 companies—the second phase will witness aggressive marketing and business strategies.

Infowavz, which was set up two years ago, offers multi-lingual and multi-location service delivery capabilities to its customers spread across North America and Europe. As per its two-pronged strategy, the first phase comprised setting up operations, building credibility and reliability, while the second phase focused on scaling up existing operations. For this, the company has already received approximately $5 million as second round funding from ICICI. Said Zia Shiekh, the founder and chief executive officer of Infowavz, “We have already established a rapport with our clients and built reliability both in terms of our delivery and internal management. The focus now would be on leveraging the present base and establishing some new ones.” Infowavz has already built a strong capability in providing customer support to companies operating in the financial services, telecom and technology sectors.

To start with, the company has tied up with Portal Net Services (PNS) to tap the growing market for offshore call centre services in the UK. As part of this partnership, Infowavz would be setting up a 500-seat capacity call centre with an investment of close to $21-22 million.

Infowavz’s centre in Mumbai currently has 500 seats and provides state-of-the-art infrastructure facilities with dedicated point-to-point fibre-optic connectivity and significant redundancies in routers, switches, power and connectivity. In an attempt to ensure that the workforce is trained to a globally-accepted standard, both the companies are partnering with global HR companies to provide employees with soft skill accredited training and assessment modules. It is understood that this will help them enhance their competency levels and facilitate a higher quality of customer care service.

The PNS centre is expected to come up by the end of the year and would be set up either in Pune or Bangalore.
Besides this, Infowavz would be setting up another facility for furthering its infrastructure and business expansion activities. For this, the company is also looking at an investment of around $5-6 million in the next 9-10 months. It is understood that the company is already in talks with certain strategic investors, who can start with an initial investment of about $1-2 million in the initial phase. The facility is expected to come up at either Hyderabad or Delhi.

However, as per its plans for the next two years, Infowavz is also planning to scale up its manpower requirement to around 5,000 individuals.

The company offers services like data mining, analysis and reporting, voice services, business process management, e-mail management, Web chat and collaboration and technical helpdesk services. In case of the multilingual skills, the main languages include French, German, Spanish, Italian, Mandarin and English.