Companies have been turning to contact centers outsourcers for decades for a number of good reasons. Most organizations aren’t equipped to handle large volumes of calls from customers, and certainly don’t have the resources to engage in outbound campaigns to improve sales and chase leads. Setting up a contact center from scratch is an expensive prospect, and doing it in an amateurish way can cost the company far more in capital than the call center could ever contribute back to revenue.

Business process outsourcers (BPOs), of course, offer a number of benefits: call center support is what they do, so they have the expertise to build effective campaigns. Since they are able to share resources across multiple clients, they can achieve economies of scale. In addition, they’re able to invest in the best and brightest of contact center technologies in order to support their business. For many contact center outsourcing companies that run efficient and cost-effective business models – think call center workers in offshore locations, or home-based agents – they can offer their clients high-quality service at lower costs than a “do-it-yourself” project could ever hope to achieve.

The rising prevalence of cloud-based contact centers has made the outsourcing model even more compelling in recent years, according to a recent blog post by cloud contact center solutions provider Five9 (News - Alert). In addition to the usual benefits – lower costs, easier administration, disaster recovery and more – some of the advantages are particularly compelling to outsourcers, who must regularly liaise with their clients to show the quality of their work. The real-time monitoring and reporting capabilities offered by cloud-based solutions allow business process outsourcing companies to deliver real-time metrics to their clients. Clients feel more comfortable paying for services they can track in real-time, and the outsourcer is more confident it’s delivering the type of services required by the contract.

In addition, the cloud-based model helps ensure that the BPO’s IT resources aren’t getting bogged down in troubleshooting.

“[A cloud-based solution can] free up IT so they can focus on delivering the tangible business results that matter most to clients including faster problem resolution, generating more leads and increasing sales conversions,” wrote Five9.

While BPO companies once had to compete with one another on cost only, the addition of cloud-based solutions can offer them more ways to provide value to their clients. Many BPO companies can now build home-based workforces of American agents so they can offer compelling costs to potential clients who may be wary of using foreign call centers. They can offer more transparency when it comes to quality programs, and ease the fears of clients who are afraid of “letting go” of a core process.