I recall BPO or Business Process Outsourcing is one of the ways a business can gain competitive advantage. Competitive advantage is the ability of a business to make competition irrelevant or it’s also doing better than the competition can do. BPO anchors its concept on CRM or Customer Relationship Management. It is a competitive advantage if businesses can build strong customer relationships — that is satisfying them not only during sales but also more importantly after sales. When customers buy a product, they are also interested on how it can be maintained. Support is needed to keep them satisfied and to build profitable relationship through repurchase.
The idea of BPO was made clear when Sutherland, a player in BPO industry, invited us for a seminar-workshop. BPO is a division of ITES or Information Technology Enabled Services. The seminar-facilitator provided us a background of the industry. He explained that while big businesses want to maintain their positions in the market through product innovations, they don’t want to lose their present customers. These present customers are potential future customers of future products. In order to do this, they have to build support groups across the globe which obviously very costly. What they do now is to transfer the responsibility to a third party, and that is the BPO industry. Call centers are part of that industry. It is just a speck of it. When businesses do that, they can now concentrate on research and development which is very crucial in a very competitive market. BPO is cost-effective and at the same time it satisfies present customers, and the result is profitable relationships.
