India’s Tech Mahindra To Hire 200 People At Riverview Call Centre
RIVERVIEW – An Indian lamp-lighting ceremony on Wednesday may have signaled the revival of the Riverview shopping mall as Tech Mahindra, a division of multinational firm Mahindra Group, opens an 18,000 square-foot business services centre there employing at least 200 people.
The jobs will be “bringing life” to Riverview’s West End, said Mayor Ann Seamans.
“Retail has pretty well moved away from the mall areas, as you’ve seen in other areas and to see this mall be able to be filled with people working here and whatever is great, because it’s also going to bring other businesses.”
Tech Mahindra plans to hire at least 200 people by the end of August and has already onboarded around 100 people at the new location, said Amit Dhingra, VP and Global Head of International Centres for Transition and Shared Services.
“Thirty per cent of the workforce will be bilingual. These are mostly customer care jobs covering the retail industry right now, but digital customer care,” he said. “So we are hiring people who already know how to use [Robotic Process Automation], INI [point-of-sale systems] and digital components or we are going to train them.”
Dhingra said educational requirements will depend on the customers employees will be serving. But Tech Mahindra is mainly looking for people with customer service experience. It will also seek out team leads, IT support staff, human resources personnel, administrative support staff and managers.
I think [customer service] comes naturally to people from this region. I’ve seen very warm people. The entire society is, what I’ve understood, bound by the family and friends network. Everybody knows everybody. And that goes a long way when you’re in customer service. We’re looking for people who can treat our end customers with care,” he said.
The company plans to bring up to 30 people from outside New Brunswick to fill some jobs, including from India, the Philippines, African countries and other parts of Canada.
The business services centre will officially open August 16 and will have more than 240 seats. It will serve large retailers in Canada, Dhingra said without providing names.
Tech Mahindra provides clients, which are mostly Fortune 500 companies, a digital service portfolio, including design, analytics and artificial intelligence.
The choice to invest in Riverview is part of parent company Mahindra Group’s commitment to invest in Canada over the next five years, Dhingra said. Mahindra Group is present in more than 100 countries.
Tech Mahindra will receive $800,000 from Opportunities NB in the form payroll rebates if it meets the criteria set out in its agreement with the provincial government. The rebates will be provided annually based on a percentage of the salary of each job filled.
Talks with ONB began just two months ago. But Dhingra said the reason to choose New Brunswick went beyond the “exemplary” support ONB provided the company.
Tech Mahindra also wants to be closer to Canadian customers, many of which need bilingual servicing.
“[The rebate] was not the deciding factor,” he said. “The bilingual and customer centred workforce is the core [reason].”
For New Brunswick, the deal could lead to other investments from Mahindra Group. The group’s Mahindra & Mahindra unit recently invested in Fredericton-based Resson, a predictive analytics company for the agricultural industry.
“I can’t say whether [it’s] manufacturing, but we are in discussions [with the New Brunswick government],” Dhingra said. “We are trying to work out a schedule where the authorities are going to visit India in September or October this year, so we already are discussing a plan for them to be in India so we start discussing and negotiating those things. I can’t confirm which sectors.”
Premier Brian Gallant says the province is trying to leverage the new relationships with companies like Tech Mahindra to encourage more investments.
“We are able to get meetings with multinationals because they have a footprint here in the province and that can allow us to discuss other types of investments that we would like to see that multinational make in the province,” said Gallant.
Jean-Paul Robicheau, VP of Investment Attraction at ONB, said it helps that New Brunswick and the Mahindra Group have a similar focus.
“IT itself is a sector we’re very interested in. Within IT, we have aerospace and defence, we have precision manufacturing, we have cybersecurity, [Artificial Intelligence] and robotics. And other IT companies who are looking to expand their application development practice,” he said. “Aerospace and defence, digital health and cybersecurity are focuses of Tech Mahindra, so that creates a really good marriage and synergy between us and them.”
Banner photo: Tech Mahindra executive Amit Dhingra led an Indian lamp lighting ceremony to symbolize prosperity and light to the new business venture in Riverview. Finance Minister Cathy Rogers and Premier Brian Gallant also took part. Image: Inda Intiar/Huddle.