In business, the customer is king, and competition is always breathing down your neck. Call centers help manage customer service and back-office tasks by outsourcing and delegating communications. This allows companies to save time, hire fewer staff, and have a dedicated structure handling their customers.
Today, every provider of goods or services, physical or digital, needs a reliable channel for customer interactions. Food delivery/taxi services, banks, and IT agencies alike may require more than one channel of support. A BPO call center takes over more than just your phone calls—it enables omnichannel, tech-driven customer support outsourcing.
What is a BPO call center and what does it do exactly? Let’s figure it out.
A business process outsourcing call center is a third-party service provider that will manage your customer communications and business processes as an outsourced contractor. But while a simple contact center works only with inbound and outbound customer calls, a BPO office can take up a much wider, more integrated range of tasks.
When turning to a business process outsourcing call center, you can fully delegate technical support, customer experience operations, whole-process tasks, and even data entry responsibilities. At the same time, your BPO partner could set up an entire custom communications system just for you, with CRM, AI, chatbots, and other integrations.
BPO contact centers take things beyond regular voice support, offering advantages like:
Best of all, a BPO office allows saving on in-house support teams to double down on core business investments instead. But there are more differences between BPOs and simple call centers that we must mention.
In order to understand which type of call center you need in your context, it’s important to know both the big and subtle differences. So let’s settle it.
Regular call centers are contracted for common tasks like customer helpdesks, order support, complaint handling, or basic customer service workflows. Their main objective is to provide consistent phone or voice support, addressing client questions or issues through defined scripts and processes.
BPO call centers are more feature-rich, if you may. They are outsourced centers that run back-office tasks, handle data entry or database management, provide technical advisory, manage email/chat support, and perform complex CX operations (e.g., outbound communications and omnichannel troubleshooting).
An average BPO contact center has an infrastructure, specialists, and technology in place to provide a fully integrated external support. Here’s how the business process outsourcing works once you decide to partner up with a BPO:
There are several go-to reasons why turn to a BPO provider in the first place. You may simply lack the resources or expertise necessary to set up support in-house. But even if you already house a support team, your company can scale its range of services and target audience.
As you scale and more customers come, each expecting top-notch individual service, a BPO agency can help actually meet and scale in line with that demand. More specifically, you’ll need BPO call center services:
Contact center BPO responsibilities are adjusted to the client’s direct needs, so the providers are usually flexible and adaptable. But we can formally subdivide BPOs into two common types by the direction in which they can provide customer and back-office support:
Handles customer-initiated contact: inquiries, complaints and disputes, support requests, order processing, service queries, technical support, returns, etc. A business usually wants to outsource to such BPOs when it struggles to handle inbound activity. For example, there can just be too many customer-facing communications coming from across multiple regions.
Focuses on proactive outreach: sales calls, lead generation, surveys, customer feedback gathering, follow-ups, telemarketing, appointment scheduling, data collection, market research, and other outbound tasks. A business can leverage outbound BPOs to scale their marketing, sales, or outreach operations without expanding internal staff.
Considering inbound vs outbound call centers, note also that many BPO providers work both ways. These are full-cycle outsourcing agencies that service enterprises and can adjust to the client’s evolving needs.
BPOs are certainly useful and can even be business-turning when employed correctly. But they are not for every business out there. You should pick a BPO partner ready to take your priorities, close your gaps, and achieve milestones for your business.
Now, let’s make it as objective as possible and answer not only what is a BPO call center and how it can help you, but also what appeals and challenges are there?
Outsourcing to a BPO call center can be a major cost-saver, reducing overhead. No need to invest in infrastructure, hiring, training, or technology.
Businesses can scale operations up or down, recruitment-free, based on demand. For example, a BPO can be contracted during busy seasons or before scaling.
BPO providers employ pre-screened agents with diverse expertise, and often provide ongoing training. Even well-coordinated, smaller in-house teams can’t beat that.
With global staffing and operations across time zones, BPO call centers can offer round-the-clock coverage. This is essential for companies with international clients or users.
BPOs help improve first-call resolution rates, cut wait times, and boost overall levels of customer satisfaction through consistent service and prompt responses.
BPOs leverage AI-powered tools, CRM systems, chatbots, and analytics to deliver faster, more consistent, and higher-quality support.
Business process outsourcing can block the direct oversight of customer interactions. If external agents fail to fully internalize your brand voice, tone, or company culture, inconsistent service may ensue.
Language barriers, cultural differences, or time-zone mismatches are common challenges and potential roots of misunderstandings. Offshore providers should be careful to match the cultural proximity of BPO staff.
Hiring an outsourcing company may imply sharing customer data with a third-party vendor. If the BPO lacks strong data protection or GDPR compliance, this can expose the business to privacy breaches and regulatory risk.
While outsourcing promises savings, some unexpected costs can still hit, like additional training, overhead for complicated workflows, or quality audits. Overreliance on a vendor might also lead to vendor lock-in.
Because agents aren’t your direct employees, maintaining consistent quality across time zones can be challenging. Especially if the BPO has high turnover or must process many clients simultaneously.
Outsourcing to BPO contact centers can help preserve costs while keeping in touch with customers and growing the value of your business — but only if done right. The BPO call center meaning can be different for new clients who turn to such services blindly and those who prepare with some know-how.
If you want to maximize the results of your turning to BPO services, there are a number of proven best practices that you should consider. Namely, make sure to:
To get visible results, you should first define exactly what you would like to see as a result of business process and customer service outsourcing. For this, you can use various performance metrics that will help you measure the efficiency of certain BPO aspects. The most common and explicit metrics that you can use include:
To keep a hired BPO partner fully involved with your business specifics and well under control, be sure to prepare for regular check-ins, shared dashboards, and two-way feedback. This will help avoid miscommunication issues and stay on the same page in terms of performance metrics. E.g., clients can view live dashboards to monitor agent load and call resolution rates.
In a specialized call center, BPO processes are heavily tech-driven, with AI automation rapidly becoming the norm. Commonly, all tasks are centralized via CRM platforms, and their monitoring and management can be automated with AI tools. You should feel free to leverage all of these abilities.
Particularly, AI analytics helps get a real-time outlook on all BPO workflows and bring quality control to a much more sensitive, insightful level. AI can gather data autonomously and report your BPO’s performance metrics, summarize agent efficiency, and provide customer sentiment analysis.
Language compatibility is very important. A competent BPO office should be able to service your target audience and consider regional and cultural specifics. If you work with foreign markets, it’s best to pick a provider with multilingual expertise and global support capabilities.
Security of data and interactions should be your next big priority. For safe operations and protected data flows, make sure your BPO of choice employs end-to-end encryption and access controls, has well-screened staff and compliance certifications in place — GDPR, PCI DSS, and ISO 27001.
One of the biggest advantages of outsourcing to a BPO is the ability to scale operations up or down depending on demand, without the burden of hiring, infrastructure, or fixed overhead. But for that to work, you will need a BPO partner that can quickly adjust staff levels and reshape the support team when required. Make sure to discuss this with your candidate at the stage of service-level agreements.
Selecting a perfectly fitting outsourcing partner requires careful vendor selection. Look for an agency with demonstrable experience, multilingual expertise, and established processes. More importantly, seek readiness to adjust to your tasks and workflow nuances. Simply Contact adapts thanks to a powerful tech infrastructure, strict compliance standards, and years of delivering CX services globally.
Ultimately, BPO call centers can be huge time- and cost-savers: they let you simply hand over customer support, back-office tasks, and CX operations to specialized external teams. No need to develop your own support infrastructure, with staff, software, and management. A BPO provider comes with their own platforms, smart tools, and multichannel support capacities.
With all of that available in one place, BPO can help you gain a major business boost. But that can be guaranteed only if you work with a proven BPO partner. Simply Contact will help you get early estimates, consult the best technological and staff choices, and plan things out before hiring a full-on BPO crew.
BPO stands for Business Process Outsourcing, which characterizes that a call center is not simply call or voice contact-oriented — it can also handle technological and overall more complex tasks. BPO contact centers can thus take up entire customer and tech support channels, handling all the communications and inquiries separately.
Call center BPO outsourcing allows specialized external teams to take over parts of a company’s customer service or business processes. A business partners with an external vendor, and that vendor provides trained agents, tools, and infrastructure for calls, chats, and emails, as well as workflow support.
What is a BPO call center if we compare it to a traditional contact center? The principal difference is that a BPO agency will also handle the day-to-day operations of its client, whereas regular call centers only work with calls and contacts. BPOs, in turn, allow outsourcing the ongoing management of customer interactions, technical support, and even certain non-voice back-office tasks.
At Simply Contact, we specialize in creating personalized customer support solutions that drive business growth and customer satisfaction. Let us help you elevate your customer experience and stand out from the competition.
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