Amazon.com Inc. is planning to open a customer service center in Hyderabad, India, that will offer e-mail support to customers, it said Wednesday.
The new facility, which is set to be operational in the second half of this year, is expected to create up to 100 new customer service jobs within six months, according to the Seattle, Washington-based Internet retailer.
As more of Amazon’s customers come from outside the U.S., the company needs to be able to respond to its customers regardless of the time zones they might be in, the company said in a statement. In 2000, Amazon outsourced some of its customer support operations to Daksh eServices Pvt. Ltd., a business process outsourcing (BPO) company in Gurgaon near Delhi. Daksh was acquired last year by IBM Corp.
Amazon could not immediately comment on whether the new facility at Hyderabad will supplement or replace the current arrangement with Daksh.
The company also has a development center in Bangalore, which is focused on search and Web services technologies.