Benefits of new DOT Guidelines for BPOs & Contact Centers

On a revolutionary note, the Department of Telecommunications of India released its pandemic-specific work regulations for the OSPs. Work from home has become the new normal since the coronavirus spread has demanded a contact-less work environment.

What is OSP?

OSP is an abbreviation of “Other Service Providers”, which is a company registered in India and provides applications services that entail IT enabled services like Tele-Banking, Tele-Marketing, Tele-medicine and voice and non-voice BPOs and Call Center Software.

By previous law, OSPs were required to register so the government could track their resource usage. OSPs usually have greater returns for minimum investment. To reap these benefits to a greater extent, many fakes OSPs started to pop up, who dealt with sensitive information without any legitimate licenses, permitting them to do so. Thus, it became imperative for these companies to register with the government to legitimize themselves. 

However, since March 2021, the country has recognized a colossal spike of coronavirus. The government went under a complete lockdown to contain the spread of the virus. Most BPOs and IT firms who offered tertiary services were also forced to shut down. Companies were laying off people as they struggled to keep their operations afloat. Many OSPs assist banks or hospitals, which makes them essential service providers by nature. To ensure work continuity, the Department of Telecommunications requested company details, physical addresses, and IP addresses of every employee who worked from home. Furthermore, DoT relaxed these work-rules again by stating that these OSPs no longer needed to show their WFH employee agreements or submit any security deposit to the government. Nevertheless, these solutions were temporarily announced to accommodate the atmosphere of remote working. 

On November 5, the DoT totally changed the rules and permitted perpetual work from home or work from any place in India for OSP representatives. Such representatives working either from home or from far off areas would be treated as an all-encompassing specialist or far off operator of the OSP. The new rules, additionally get rid of the need to involve bank liabilities for interconnectivity from various locations. 
 

How does the new guidelines benefit us?

The new guidelines benefit the BPOs and ITs in many ways. They reduce their operational costs by cutting down on the cost of location, premise rent, electric bills, and more. Now that remote contact center agents are being recognized as working or extended employees, companies no longer need to provide specific details of these agents to the DOT for compliance purposes. Paying heed to this, we can expect a standard rise in work from home normative. To ensure an in-office experience, we at C-Zentrix provide Cloud Contact Center Solution and mobile-specific solutions for remote contact center agents.

Read the DOT Guidelines here. 

Our Cloud Contact Center Solutions allows agents to conduct inbound and outbound calls through their smartphones. Our efficient system ensures masking of the numbers for both agent and client, so the privacy of the parties is maintained. In case it is an on-premise setup, then the on-premise server is connected to the internet over a secure VPN connection, which is further accessed by the agents remotely. Their mobile numbers will be mapped against their accounts, using which they can log in to the server. This doesn't require a heavy setup of any sort. A standard tablet, laptop or even a smartphone can very well equip your agents to work from home, reducing your operational costs significantly. Managers can use CZ Screen logger or CZ Voice loggers to record and track agent performance for audit purposes. 

Furthermore, we also offer a mobile CRM alongside a mobile dashboard to make the complete workstation readily available at the fingertips of every agent. Once logged in, agents can access the customer contacts, customer CRM page, call notifications and SMS functionalities. We support the new relaxed compliance norms as it opens up new work-culture, new opportunities, and reduced costs for the companies. We hope these rules go a long way in improving remote working infrastructure and attract more companies to set up their operations in India.