Staff Correspondent

Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission will start issuing licences for call centres in April, the commission's chairman said Wednesday.

The BTRC Wednesday organised a "public hearing" on call centre licensing at the Bangladesh-China Friendship Conference Centre to listen to people's concerns on the matter. Some 2,100 people took part in the hearing.

A final guideline will be published later this month after everybody's opinion is analysed, said BTRC chairman Manzurul Alam. Major functions of the call centres are customer services of large companies, and sales and marketing.

The sales and marketing include cold calling, email pitches, telephone surveys, lead generation and appointment setting. Other areas of services by call centres are intellectual property research and documentation, legal services, medical transcription, payroll maintenance and other transaction processing, product development, publishing, research and analysis.

The commission will seek applications in early April and start issuing licences by the end of April, he said. According to the proposed guideline, the authorities will offer a three-year break for revenue sharing for call centres in Dhaka and Chittagong, and five years for other areas.

But the call centres have to pay 0.5 percent of the revenues after revenue-sharing holiday ends, he said. There will be two types of call centre licences—licence for domestic call centre services and licence for international call centre services.

The licences will be in three categories for both national and international services, such as hosted call centre services provider, hosted call centre licence and call centre licence. Up to 40 percent foreign investment will be allowed to set up a hosted call centre services provider but 25 percent for others.

Foreign citizens will be allowed to be recruited to the call centres as per demand in the first one year, but the ratio for foreign recruitment will be only 10 percent of the total recruitment after one year.

BTRC official Abdullah Ferdous told bdnews24.com that authorities had wanted the call centres to be operated by local employees. But it is highly likely that foreign nationals will be employed to enhance efficiency of local workers, he said.

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