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Outsourcing is a tightrope walk for businesses. Choosing not to outsource can slow growth, but handing your customers over to outsourced call center agents (also called BPO) who you haven't personally hired takes a lot of trust and certainty.

As a customer, I can vividly recall my worst BPO call center experience. That patience-testing 6-hour conversation with customer support has been burned into my memory; it also ended without resolution. I canceled my plan after only being a customer for two days — even though I paid for three years upfront.

That company lived every business‘s biggest BPO fear: a poor outsourcing experience that causes customers to leave. So, is it worth it for companies to partner with a BPO vendor? For some companies, the answer is a resounding yes. For others, the drawbacks will outweigh the benefits. Let’s look at the pros and cons of this path, plus how to tell when you're ready to take the plunge.

In this article, you'll learn:

• What is a BPO experience?
• What is a BPO call center?
• Pros of BPO Centers
• Cons of BPO Centers
• When to Use a BPO Center

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What is a BPO experience?

BPO stands for business process outsourcing, which involves outsourcing individual business tasks.
A BPO experience is a more holistic approach to business outsourcing with a focus on long-term partnerships. A good BPO experience helps improve core business functions and usually cuts costs by outsourcing services for your business to lower-cost areas, though this must be done ethically.

BPO vendors can cover core competencies like:

• Market research.
• Customer support.
• Manufacturing.
• Supply chain management.
• Order processing.
• Human resources.
• Technical assistance.
• Content creation.
• Data entry.
• Graphic design.
• Accounting.
• Legal services.

It's a wide umbrella, but the BPO industry often focuses on customer service operations (email, chat, and voice support).

What is a BPO call center?

A BPO call center is an outsourcing provider that specializes in phone support for businesses. This can cover both inbound and outbound calls. Call centers have been popular outsourcing choices for decades.

Despite customers having abundant contact options online, phone support is still an essential point of contact for businesses in 2025. of call centers saw an increase in inbound voice calls from 2022 to 2023.

In terms of juxtaposition to your company, there are three specific types of BPO call centers:

• Onshore outsourcing — local outsourcing, which often reduces cost savings but reduces language, culture, and timezone barriers.
• Nearshore outsourcing — nearby outsourcing, such as a French company outsourcing to Morocco. This offers geographic flexibility, but it reduces timezone conflicts.
• Offshore outsourcing — outsourcing anywhere around the globe, offering great potential cost savings, plus language and timezone availability.

Pros of BPO Centers

Let's look at the primary advantages of choosing a BPO experience.

Scalability

Company growth often comes hand in hand with a difficult question — when are you ready to hire additional staff? And how can you handle onboarding them yourself if you're already stretched too thin?

Working with a quality BPO center allows you to strategically scale your operations. A good provider will be a partner with you and will alleviate a lot of the pains of scaling independently.

Focused Expertise

Customer service reps have to deal with increasingly demanding customer expectations and, more importantly, with clientele that are increasingly vocal about their experiences. One bad customer service interaction can result in a poor review on TrustPilot or an angry video on TikTok.

, 21% of customer service representatives find it challenging to keep up with increasingly demanding customer expectations.

Why not hand it over to the pros? Enlisting the services of a BPO provider means you hand over your customer service needs to a larger team that is more specialized and more capable of dealing with today’s customers.

Cost Efficiency

According to the , cost savings are the top motive for outsourcing business operations. This is probably the most well-known reason for outsourcing, but the desire to cut costs alone isn't a good enough reason to pursue BPO services.

“There are serious risks in allowing cost savings alone to guide your outsourcing decisions,” Vidya Plainfield penned in . She goes on to cite ethics concerns that we'll dive deeper into in a minute.

Language Availability

If your company operates beyond your country's borders, it’s very likely to run into customers who prefer to speak multiple languages. With the large selection of BPOs on the market, you can have your customers be answered by native speakers in almost any language.

Cons of BPO Centers

Some companies will choose a BPO experience and lose customers as a result, like the company that I had a negative experience with. Here are the disadvantages that you face when choosing BPO.

Growth Challenges

What‘s your company’s service philosophy? Do you have tried-and-true SOPs and service scripts? Clearly defined roles? If you don‘t have those already, you’ll have to make something up to onboard the center agents.

Established companies will have fewer issues with setting up their BPO team for success, but some businesses will discover a lot of holes during this process. In particular, startups that have scaled quickly may find themselves needing to quickly develop service level agreements (SLA) on the fly to hand over to the BPO center.

Growing too quickly is a hole that many companies have fallen into.

Quality Challenges

Quality assurance is integral to a positive customer experience. It's a challenge for all large companies, especially those choosing offshore outsourcing. There are a few specific quality challenges with business process outsourcing:

• Cultural differences can present misaligned expectations.
• Lack of hiring control, as BPO companies hire the call center agents instead of your company.
• Indirect supervision may result in different managerial decisions being made.

If customer satisfaction is impacted by these factors, the choice to outsource can become a liability.

Time Zone Challenges

Offshore outsourcing often results in a team that's spread across the globe. This creates challenges for managers who like to have overlapping working hours.

Important note: Time zone differences could be a pro for your company instead of a con. For example, a Canada-based company may choose to handle customer operations during their business hours. Then, after hours, customer communication is handed to BPO agents in the Philippines. Opposite time zones can be extremely valuable when leveraged strategically.

Security and Regulatory Compliance

Working with third-party vendors always creates holes where information and data can be mishandled. This is rarely done on purpose; the larger the team, the more opportunities there are for systems to get infected with malware.

According to the , three of the top five global business services are finance, information technology, and taxes. Those are all highly regulated industries that require flawless security.

Companies that process sensitive customer information, such as healthcare and banking, will need to weigh the risk-benefit heavily.

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• Buyer's Journey Template
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• Day-in-the-Life Template
• And more!

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When to Use a BPO Center

While the outsourcing opportunities are endless, it‘s not right for everyone. Here are five signs that you’re ready to use a BPO center.

You can afford ethical outsourcing.

Companies that can‘t afford to pay workers fair wages aren’t ready to outsource. While you might be able to find BPO service providers with very low prices, you have to be critical of their ethics before choosing a partner.

warns that unfair wages, poor working conditions, and graveyard shifts are some of the biggest issues.

“The outsourcing culture has drowned us economically, especially writers from countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India,” , who's located in Pakistan. I met Hamaz on LinkedIn, and we spoke about the outsourcing issues he faces as a freelance writer.

He‘s had his work published in major publications, but he was paid low wages. He wasn’t even listed as an author. "BPO companies take advantage. There needs to be recognition of writers' work,” he says.

There are ways to outsource morally — the from Outsource-Philippines covers this point in-depth.

Another great resource is in Forbes by Vidya Plainfield on why ethical outsourcing should matter for your business. “If you wish to truly enjoy the lasting benefits of a strong outsourcing partnership, I believe ethics should be high on your list of considerations," Plainfield wrote.

Quality is going down on your own.

When business is booming, and you can‘t keep up, it can feel less like fireworks and more like dynamite. If you feel like you’re exploding with customer service requests, you're not alone.

In fact, say they're getting more customer service tickets than ever before.

Are these numbers increasing?

• Customer churn rate
• Average response time
• Customer effort score

And are these numbers decreasing?

• Net Promoter Score
• Ticket resolution rate
• Customer satisfaction score

These signs might be pointing to a capacity issue that needs to be addressed. Poor service is a costly road for a business to go down.

88% of customers in our State of Service report say that the experience a company provides is as important to them as its product or services.

Source

Pro tip: Choose scalable BPO center services to avoid hitting another ceiling with your growth.

“Evaluate how the BPO scales during busy times. Understand how they handle sudden demand spikes without sacrificing quality,” shares , head of marketing and AI expert at .

"Ask about their contingency plans, how flexible their staffing is, and the technology they use to ensure smooth scaling. A BPO that’s prepared for the unexpected can help your business maintain high standards and keep customers satisfied, even when things get hectic,” Ambos says.

You know your customer's needs.

When you choose to outsource part of your business, you let go of following the day-to-day minutiae. It‘s a good thing: you don’t need to hear about every complaint that your call center operations have handled.

But moving customer-related services out of your house means no more overhearing parts of outgoing customer calls or the water cooler chatter about customer interactions. Businesses risk becoming disconnected from customers by outsourcing their communication. If you're still figuring out your customer or your product, then this is a huge gamble.

AI has already been leveraged.

Artificial intelligence has a lot of applications that should be addressed before searching for a BPO provider. It's a piece of low-hanging fruit to improve customer satisfaction — one that needs to be addressed sooner rather than later if you intend to keep up with your industry.

84% of CRM leaders consider AI to be instrumental in interacting with modern customers.

Source

BPO providers can help you with this, if you choose correctly.

“When selecting a BPO partner, look beyond the immediate cost savings and evaluate their technological capabilities, particularly their investment in AI and automation — these will determine their ability to scale and evolve with your business needs,” shares , Director of Corporate Strategy and Operations at .

"Based on my experience leading Fortune 100 transformations, the most successful BPO partnerships are those where the provider acts as a strategic partner in modernizing operations rather than simply a cost arbitrage play,” says Ramsinghaney.

Your SOPs work well.

SOPs, or standard operating procedures, are the lifeblood of productive teams. Some BPO providers will help you develop SOPs, but a specific concern comes to my mind when I think about outsourcing without a roadmap already in place.

Have you ever been a part of a disorganized team that could handle growth? I know I haven‘t been. I’ve worked on teams that have chosen outsourcing as a bandaid on the bullet wound of disorganization, and I've never seen it go well.

Statistic: say that having a clear definition of roles and accountability is their top factor for success.

Create a working system with well-defined roles before you try to outsource operations.

When BPOs Work

Outsourcing is nothing new, but I admit I didn't realize the depth of the BPO world until I researched this topic more deeply. The opportunities to find a trusted partner and scale together are unlimited.

In a perfect world, every business would take this step ethically and build a global team where all parties are compensated fairly for their contributions. Let's make that a reality.

Free Customer Journey Template

Outline your company's customer journey and experience with these 7 free templates.

• Buyer's Journey Template
• Future State Template
• Day-in-the-Life Template
• And more!

Download for free

Download Free

All fields are required.

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.