What is BPO?

5th February 2019

Discover What BPO Is and If It’s the Right Solution for Your Business

BPO, which stands for business process outsourcing, is a hot topic and a trending solution for today’s astute business leaders who want to enhance outcomes, speed results, and save money in the process. To determine if business process outsourcing is right for your organization, first let’s discover what it is.

Business Process Outsourcing

Business process outsourcing (BPO) is a subset of the overall outsourcing model, which looks at contracting services with a third-party provider. Initially this started in the manufacturing sector and quickly moved to encompass all aspects of business functions and services.

Onshore

When people think of business process outsourcing, they immediately assume this means sending work offshore. Though this can be the case, much of the business process outsourcing occurs within the United States. This is a growing trend: to keep BPO work onshore and not ship it to another country.

Though the greatest cost savings can often occur when sending work to a country with a lower cost of living, the side effects of this are often grave: a loss of quality, a decrease in efficiency, and in increase in overhead costs and hassles when trying to manage the complexities of sending work to a different culture. And all this is in addition to the frustration that customers and prospects encounter when trying to effectively communicate with someone from a different country and with a different background. That’s why offshoring often alienates the people you’re attempting to serve.

As a result, onshore BPO is gaining popularity. When outsourcing within the United States, the key outcomes are increased quality, improved efficiency, and decreased overhead requirements. In addition, customers and prospects receive excellent service.

Front Office

BPO can also address back-office work (HR, finance, and accounting), but front office work—addressing customer-facing services—such as contact center work, is where BPO shines. This is arguably the largest and fastest growing sector of business process outsourcing.

Contact Center Work

Many people use the word call center and contact center interchangeably, yet there are important differences. By definition, a call center focuses on phone calls, whereas a contact center addresses a plethora of communication options. In addition to the telephone, it includes email, text communications, and social media interaction. Because of the breadth of communication channels covered by business process outsourcing, it’s rapidly becoming a must-have for businesses who want to provide the best communication services for their customers and prospects.

BPO Application

Contact center business process outsourcing is ideal for any organization that wants to provide the best communication options to their clients, customers, and prospects. And when they outsource these critical services to a US-based BPO contact center, the company can realize increase quality, improved efficiency, and less headache, all the while saving money and delighting their stakeholders with increased accessibility, greater quality, and better outcomes.

Direct Call Centers provides call center and contact center services to clients across the United States and around the world. Specializing in business process outsourcing (BPO), Direct Call Centers is your single source for essential contact center work and critical BPO support services, with a focus on four primary horizontal market niches: customer service, tech support, lead processing, and chargeback support. Get a free quote today to explore if Direct Call Centers is the right match for your company’s BPO needs. Peter Lyle DeHaan is a freelance writer for the call center industry.