BPO and Call Center are very similar concepts and have become very common p0lace terms these days. However, difference between a BPO and call center is what confuses many and it is easy to see why. While many functions of a BPO are performed using a call center, the converse is not necessarily true and both have their own features that need to be highlighted to differentiate between the two.
BPO
BPO stands for Business Process Outsourcing and is the process of hiring another company, mostly oversees to carry out business operations for you. These operations or activities can be varied and may include finance, administration, HR functions, call center, customer services, payroll and many other activities. This is done to make use of expertise of vendors for some of the critical or non critical activities. A BPO company generally partners with another company to manage one or more aspects of company’s business. Business process outsourcing is normally resorted to by companies to save on money. Recently companies in Asia and Africa have emerged as successful BPO companies as they are providing reliable and efficient service to companies in the west at cheaper rates. It is financially more convenient for western companies to hand over some of their operations to BPO companies in Asian countries than to hire local employees who prove to be more costly.
Call Center
Call center is a centralized office mostly used for receiving and transmitting information and troubleshooting through telephones. A call center is utilized for the support of products and to solve the queries of customers. Business is conducted over phone only in case of call center. Employees sit on separate computers in a call center and manage incoming and outgoing calls. These calls can concern telemarketing, survey generation, customer support, taking of orders, and many other functions.
Thus, a BPO performs one or more operations of any other overseas company, and foreign company utilizes these services to save on costs or to gain in productivity. On the other hand, a call center performs that part of any business that requires handling of calls. In a sense, a call center is a BPO organization. However, a BPO company may or may not have a call center as there are BPO organizations handling work that are carried out over websites without the need of telephone lines.
BPO is a much broader term encompassing many more functions apart from handling a call center. There are BPO organizations providing IT services, financial services etc, which do not have call centers. A call center is a voice based system while BPO performs a wide variety of functions in addition to handling phone calls.
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Summary • BPO is a company that performs one or more business operations of an overseas company, while call center where all the work is done over telephone lines. • While call center may be a subset of BPO, the converse is not true.
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