BPO vs. Contact Center

Call center services and BPO are frequently used interchangeably. Many people believe that call center services and BPO refer to the same thing and combine the two into a single BPO center for various services. But this is not true. Despite their similarities, they both have some significant differences. 

What does “Business Process Outsourcing” (BPO) mean?

Business process outsourcing, or BPO, is the practice of contracting out routine business operations to a third party. BPO has many outstanding qualities, including superior accounting, payroll, human resource management, call center, etc.

What is the definition of a call center?

Call centers are integrated service providers that take and forward phone calls from both current and potential customers. A company’s in-house call centers or a third-party call center can handle both incoming and outgoing calls. Numerous services are typically offered by call centers, including billing, debt collection, telemarketing, and others. Additionally, they facilitate better customer and brand communication by ensuring that the appropriate departments handle requests or by answering service and support questions.

What distinguishes call centers from BPOs?

Typically, a BPO center is in charge of managing a process for another business organization. BPO services are designed and used by businesses to reduce costs or increase productivity. A call center service, on the other hand, is created to handle the duties associated with another organization’s business process, which primarily involves phone calls. For instance, a call center deals with phone-in consumer complaints, order-taking, and booking inquiries.

Therefore, we can say that a call center is a BPO business with a specific service range. For example, businesses that provide BPO services to clients like medical transcription organizations do not handle phone calls but instead advertise their services online. Though the scope of tasks covered by BPO services is broad, they are limited to non-core activities like back-office administration, data collection, and client engagement through manual efforts and AI-based services like chatbots.

Is BPO the same as a call center?

Capital NO. Given the stark contrasts between the two, it is obvious that BPO extends beyond the services provided by call centers. BPO centers can be seen from a broad perspective as a set of services that are provided to businesses by third parties. The organizations do contain a sizable number of departments and domains. The whole structure of BPO includes services like finance and accounting, human resources, data entry and management, and most significantly, the call center. The call center is simply a subset of a BPO center, created to provide customers with satisfactory answers to their inquiries via their preferred medium, including phone calls, text messages, social media, and more.

Is BPO the same as a call center

Call center services at EmpireOne Contact Center

Inbound Calls

Inbound call center calls handle incoming calls. The majority of the time, it involves providing a service to present customers or potential customers who want to make a purchase, but it could also require attending to their complaints and inquiries. Generally, inbound call centers help customers who want instructions or assistance with an issue.

Outbound Call Center 

A low-cost way to increase the reach of your company is to hire an outbound call center that calls on your behalf. Agents at outbound call centers often have to increase their sales reach and sell to new customers.

Chat and Email Interactions 

When your customers choose to chat or send emails in order to make inquiries, purchase, or lodge a complaint, we have ready hands that will offer swift responses to such queries. 

Conclusion

EmpireOne Contact Center is one of the market leaders in business process outsourcing. We provide comprehensive solutions with a wide array of services, including customer service, sales, technical support, back-office admin, appointment settings, virtual assistant services, lead generation, and qualification. We would like to offer you our services. Reach out to us today.