Telenor inaugurates all women call center to create employment opportunities for women in rural areas

As part of its commitment to empower women and bridge the gender gap within and outside the organisation, Telenor India has inaugurated an all women contact center in Jamshedpur. This facility will not only serve Telenor customers better but will offer employment opportunities in the IT sector for women from rural areas of Bihar and Jharkhand.

This is the third ‘all women’ call center for Telenor India. The other two centers are in Solan Himachal Pradesh and Ethakota near Hyderabad in Andhra Pradesh. These centers are managed by Tata-BSS. Telenor also operates an outbound call center from Patna called DIAL. This center supports “Project Sampark” that targets to reduce ‘mobile gender gap’ and increase rural women’s access to mobile phones.

Vivek Sood, CEO, Telenor India said, “Telenor encourages gender diversity at work pace and aims to create a positive impact on the society through women centric initiatives. These centers will enable us to provide enhanced and consistent customer experience across all touch points. Basis an internal assessment, the customer satisfaction score has improved by 5%, call quality scores and resolution rates have increased by 10% and the repeat calls have gone down by 10% at these centers.”

The Jamshedpur center will serve Telenor subscribers in Bihar and Jharkhand for which they can call on 121. Currently, this center operates from 7 AM to 8 PM and has a capacity of 425 seats. Telenor believes in gender-diverse workforce and creates a culture that increases productivity and efficiencies within the organization. The company has been driving the gender diversity agenda through initiatives like Inner Katha. This theatre based experiential programme promotes sensitization towards biases against women at workplace.

Telenor has taken a conscious step to promote diversity in its workforce and aims to have at least 50% women when hiring new employees for next few years. The women call center in Jamshedpur is a step towards this goal. The company is also promoting and giving preference to women entrepreneurs by giving them opportunity to become Telenor retailers.

Telenor has provided safe working environment to women employees and ensured complete adherence to the safety and security norms with regular HSSE (Health/safety/security/environment) measures. Women employees at the call center will be provided transport facility in during late working hours.  Recently, Telenor also announced six month paid maternity leave in order to retain its women employees. It has also implemented flexi timings and work from home policy.