BPO to Long Term Career

Starting a BPO in not at all like it was in late 90s when BPOs started. Starting a BPO organization then was like the following: Finding an Infrastructure which is seating area with phone, electricity, Internet Finding a company / client that is willing to outsource their work mainly to cut cost through labour arbitrage Hiring workforce after understanding the client / business requirement like: knowledge levels, proficiency, qualification etc Training the work force like process training, voice and accent training, culture training etc Starting the service and sending invoices to the clients on an agreed frequency Today, BPOs are shrinking and BPMs are evolving which means outsourcing of typical jobs like customer service, complaint handling, account information calls etc is diminishing as the world is moving towards automation, chatbots, self service portals, account information on Apps and IVR. Instead, there is a new world of outsourcing which is growing ...

Let's again go back to the basics and understand this in detail. While I am using the term BPO very often, I also want to talk very briefly about the difference between a BPO/BPM and contact center. Example: Company A: This is a US telecom company that sells monthly subscriptions to customers and selling the subscription includes the following: Lead Generation: Finding the customers Sales: Getting in touch with the customer, explaining various subscriptions to them and eventually getting the customers onboard Billing & Collection: Sending monthly invoices and collecting payments Customer Service: Servicing customers by handling their queries and addressing complaints to ensure that the customers are happy For this kind of a business the company will have to set up various departments and teams and maintain large pools of staff. Let's take a look: Lead Generation Team Back-office Research team for online research team Calling team that calls the customer...

I would like to start with the definition of BPO, Business Process Outsourcing. While the definition is easily available on the web, I would like to make it layman and easy to understand. Business Process Outsourcing means moving a company's work to another company that has the expertise in the work. For example: If I open a sales company with 100 employees, I will have to give them salaries which needs attendance tracking, time tracking and calculation of  salaries accordingly. All this requires accounting knowledge and in my company I will only have sales people. So, instead of hiring a team of accountants, I will move my salary calculation work to an accounting company which has expertise of doing this. Here, moving salary accounting is called  outsourcing.