Global business process outsourcing services provider Firstsource Solutions, and India`s biggest mobile services provider, Bharti Airtel, have signed a three year outsourcing agreement.

Firstsource will provide a suite of BPO services covering both voice and back-office in areas such as customer accounting, value-added services (VAS) provisioning, fraud and credit monitoring.

Firstsource's services will also cover collections, customer service and customer retention, amongst others, from its centres in Chennai and Mumbai, a press release said.

The company would also set up centres in Vashi and Chennai for Airtel and expects to have over 1,000 employees in the first year focussed on providing services in English and eight other regional languages to Airtel's customers.

"The partnership will support our extraordinary growth and allow us to focus on our core business of creating innovative products and services for our customers and our partners," said Jai Menon, Bharti Airtel's director, Customer Service and Information Technology.

Firstsource's joint managing director and COO, Raju Venkatraman, said, "We look forward to leveraging our process expertise to help Airtel get better operational flexibility, productivity and increased customer satisfaction."

Firstsource is a leading global provider of business process management services. Founded in 2001, it operates on a global delivery model which includes over 17,000 employees across India, US, UK, Argentina and the Philippines. Over 36 per cent of its annual revenue is obtained from the telecom vertical.

Bharti Airtel Limited, a group company of Bharti Enterprises, is India's leading integrated telecom services provider with an aggregate of 64.26 million customers as of end of March 2008, consisting of 61.98 million mobile customers.

Shares of Bharti Airtel ended 0.74 per cent down at Rs822.65, while those for Firstsource Solutions rose 7.21 per cent to Rs43.85 on Wednesday close, a day on which the benchmark Sensex registered modest gains of around 13 points.