Evolution of BPO

World's Best BPO Vendors

Owing to the huge opportunity that lies in BPO, large corporations have ventured into the business and have set up BPO operations all over the world. There is a strong competition among these multinationals and many organizations such as the Outsourcing Management Institute, the Chief Resource Officer Institute, DataQuest and BPOrbit release BPO rankings each year. The Black Book of Outsourcing by Doug Brown and Scott Wilson provides a list of world's best BPO vendors for the year 2004-2005. The parameters used for ranking these vendors include customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, reviews of global consulting firms, performance with respect to other vendors and client performance ratings. The top 10 BPO vendors have been listed Table 2.

BPO Trends

The BPO industry is a developing sector and is being studied by analysts and researchers all over the world. Analysts tracking BPO have observed the following trends in the industry:

• The BPO market worldwide is expanding with new services getting added to the list of business processes that are outsourced and new locations coming up as potential offshore destinations, India being the most preferred destination for offshore BPO.
• Cost savings is one of the most important drivers now. Information security, execution capability and financial stability are important considerations while selecting a vendor.
• According to IDC, customer care and logistics are mature segments, while procurement and training are emerging markets and are expected to have a growth of more than 10 percent in the next five years.
• Gartner has also observed the latest trend of offshore insourcing , in which firms establish their own offshore captive centers. These captive centers are generally shared service centers and allow the firms to retain control over the processes.