The world has changed a lot since the internet was discovered. It revolutionized how people connect with the world and with each other. Before the internet, people send letters via mail. Telephone lines keep them busy when chatting with friends. If you want to know the latest news, you need to go out and buy a newspaper. But today, people use chats, instant messaging, and video calls. They can read the news with just a click on their mobile phones.

The internet has changed even the way people work. They are no longer confined to the traditional 8-hour operations. Business outsourcing services have been a common thing among companies – from small startups to Fortune 500 companies. Most people thought that a business process outsourcing (BPO) and a call centre are one and the same. Sometimes, others interchanged the terms. A BPO and a call centre are indeed related to each other. They both provide business outsourcing services. But such words are not interchangeable because they have different scopes and meanings. Here’s how they differ.

What is Business Process Outsourcing?

Business process outsourcing means contracting specific works outside of the company. An external service provider will perform business outsourcing services for the company. These services commonly include:

• Accounting
• Bookkeeping
• Customer support
• Data recording
• Payrolling
• Sales
• Social media management
• Technical support
• Telemarketing

BPOs support supplementary functions to decrease in-house labor costs and increase operational productivity. There are two categories of BPO services. These are the back-office services and front-office services. Back-office services cover internal business processes like accounting, bookkeeping, data recording, payrolling, and social media management. Front office services cover customer-facing processes like customer support, sales, technical support, and telemarketing. Call centre services are commonly under the front office category of a BPO.

What is a Call centre?

A call centre is an external service provider that handles telephony services for companies. These typically include inbound and outbound calls for after-sales support, billing, collection, customer service, market research, sales, and telemarketing. Call centres traditionally used an automatic call distributor (ACD), headsets, and interactive voice response (IVR). As they became a competitive market, more innovations emerged such as chatbots, knowledge base, screen pop-ups, and smart desktops.

Difference Between a Business Process Outsourcing Company and a Call centre

Based on the definition and explanation of a BPO and a call centre, we can now clearly enumerate the differences between them.

A business process outsourcing covers a larger scope than a call centre. Clearly, a call centre can be one division or section in a BPO company.  So, we can consider call centre services as BPO services but not vice-versa.

Another major difference between a business process outsourcing and a call centre is the operational process they handle. BPO companies commonly perform behind the scene works. They handle the accounting, billing, bookkeeping, chats, data recording, email, and patrolling works for a company. Call centres handle direct communications with the clients and customers. They provide customer service support, sales, technical support, and telemarketing through calls.

Companies hire external service providers for BPOs and call centres in order to decrease operational costs and increase productivity. But these two entities have separate target goals. A business process outsourcing aims to provide faster and more efficient operational processes. While a call centre focuses on giving the best customer service experience. In order to achieve these target goals, BPOs and call centres should work hand in hand to smoothen the workflow for the benefit of the company and its clients.