Comparison between Business Process Outsourcing and a Call Center

[markwarne]

BPO refers to outsourcing business to a different location. Many BPOs comprise of call centers. A lot of times the term call center is mixed up with BPO, however the scope for both the terms is different. Call centre is not exactly same as BPO. In BPO, functions can span across transcriptions, record maintenance and accounting, however in call centres services are limited to telephone related services. In other words call centre is a BPO with telephone related operations for other company. Such operations may be incoming customer support, outgoing telemarketing, survey generation, client relations, etc.

Because of the fact that a large chunk of business processes involve client interaction/ coordination and client servicing, call-centre is now becoming more & more popular. Call centers can be divided into two categories inbound and outbound. Outbound involves calling customers for telemarketing, etc. Debt collection is also one important process carried out at many call centres. Inbound services refer to those services in which you attend calls from the clients.

BPO may involve processes such as record storage or software development too. A BPO is responsible for the entire process or a part of it. Outsourcing becomes more and more popular with the increase in demand as many times it is more feasible to hire a 3rd party organization than using local resources.