The business process outsourcing (BPO) industry has undergone radical changes in recent years. While outsourcing contact center services to third parties isn’t a new idea, it’s a very different prospect that it once was. While once outsourcing was reserved generally only for voice calls, business process outsourcers today can help companies meet a variety of different multichannel needs on both an inbound and outbound basis.

But it’s not only about channels. By integrating system, a client company and an outsourcer can share information on an unprecedented basis, according to Taliba Fatima blogging for BPO service provider Go4customer. 

“Today, with new technological advancements the industry has undergone a complete transformation,” wrote Fatima. “Besides helping businesses in improving efficiencies and reducing operational costs, third party service providers help them in gaining competitive edge by offering business and customer insights. This allows clients to gain high end data analytics, perform better financial planning, and serve their clients in a better way.”

In decades past, there was a significant disconnection between the outsourcer and the client. They weren’t running the same software, they weren’t running the same call center platform and they couldn’t transfer calls or other contacts between them. BPO companies received an initial briefing on their goals, and they reported their performance, but they operated largely in isolation from their client.

Today, thanks to cloud-based contact center technologies, clients and BPO companies can operate in sync as partners both for phone calls and non-voice channels and tasks.

“Today, a range of services offered by the BPM industry consist of legal process outsourcing (LPO), research and business analytics, supply chain and procurement outsourcing, business engineering, medical process outsourcing (MPO), and knowledge process outsourcing,” wrote Fatima.

This has been beneficial not only for clients, who can outsource tasks so they can focus on their core competencies, but also for business process outsourcing companies, who can round out their call center offerings and provide a greater array of integrated services. More complex processes that requires experts – think of social media monitoring and analysis – can be put into the hands of specialist companies tuned in to ensuring that social media is supplementing the customer experience.  And thanks to the cloud, client companies and BPO companies can ensure they are working together toward the same goal with no loss of knowledge or gaps in the customer experience.