The Evolution Of Bpo Sector Into The Present Glory: What You Should Know

By Author: Alicia Johnson
Total Articles: 15
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The modern business industry can barely be imagined without the BPO sector. Without the BPO sector in function right now, the implementation of 24x7 customer service would not be possible. The same goes with round-the-clock IT support and the implementation of all of this at a very affordable rate. 
 
When we look at the BPO industry now, we see a technologically sophisticated sector that is imbibed with everything necessary to ease customer experience and enhance quality. However, when BPO was synonymous to call centers only, there wasn’t much to play around with back in the days. 
 
The Early History
 
The BPO or outsourcing industry gained popularity only when the telecommunications and transport between countries and continents became affordable than what they used to be in the 60s and 70s. The very first traces of outsourcing came in the form of ‘Time-sharing’ between the 1950s and 1980s. The system worked by allocating timeshares with remote terminals at distant facilities. This was done with the use of large computing devices ...
... that were built by some of the renowned companies, like IBM. 
 
The BPO sector continued to remain under the shade until the late 1980s. In this instance, the sector grossed its first-ever client in the IT sector. It was Eastman Kodak who decided to outsource the entire IT system to a BPO company. This move took all the business veterans by surprise and was considered an unprecedented instance. 
 
The success of Kodak brought about good news for the BPO sector, and the trend continued until the next decade. However, even till then, the BPO sector was still domestic or near-shoring assistance. 
 
The Consolidation Period
 
The present-day outbound and inbound call center outsourcing started taking shape from the early 2000s. By this time, the entire industry had gained business maturity and had started to gain traction as a full-fledged sector. 
 
This was only when the companies in these industries had started assessing their place in the global corporate world and supply chain. And this was only when the organizations that wanted to become future-proof started forming and adopting newer technologies and methodologies to add efficacy and efficiency as feathers to their hat. 
 
By the late 2000s, the groundwork for the modern-day BPO infrastructure was already laid. For example, most of the companies in this sector started using a more complex form of dialers and customer data storage tools, call recording for quality assurance, etc. Also, off-shoring was already popular by this time, though removing cloud servers was still reduced to globally established organizations. 
 
The Most Popular Client for the BPO Sector
 
The BPO sector started to service most industries by the second decade of the 21st century. However, there were a couple of industries that were the most frequent and biggest clients. The most popular one of them was telecom services outsourcing. 
 

Telecom 

 
The service offering for telecom outsourcing a decade back wasn’t much different than what we have now, though the quality assurance and customer satisfaction over multiple channels. The primary portfolio for the telecom services outsourcing included customer acquisition, customer service and support, marketing and sales, and order management. 
 
Quite interestingly, it is the same right now. However, the usage of modern tools, KPI monitoring, data analytics, and various new ways of training have shot the effectiveness to a whole new level. 
 

Energy & Utility 

 
Right since the beginning of the century, the energy and utility sector has been one of the prime clients for the BPO companies. Similar to telecom, the nature of energy and utility services outsourcing was more or less the same. 
 
The primary services that exist in modern times are customer acquisition, lead generation, customer service and support, win-back, quality assurance, third-party verification, etc. These services have been the same even during the early 2000s, though the parameters for quality assurance was nowhere as sophisticated as it is now. 
 
Finishing the Story Up 
 
The BPO industry has gone through massive changes ever since it first came into existence. The global expansion and adoption of newer technology have been the main reason behind the massive development in the sector. 
 
Starting from healthcare and travel and hospitality to eCommerce and EdTech, the best BPO companies have seeped deep within all the sectors and offered customer-focused and client-centric service. 
 
Moreover, the sector is looking bright with great prospects. While data analytics has already made its way into the sector, RPA (robotic process automation) is still possible soon. Once this is done, the sector will continue to scale higher from its present market value. As per a 2019 report made by Statista, the outsourcing industry had a global market size of 92.5 billion, continuing to grow with the pandemic recovery.