What Is A BPO or Call Center?

If you have ever called a bank, an airline, or a tech support line, you have interacted with the massive industry known as the BPO sector. While many people think of "Call Centers" as just rooms full of phones, they are actually sophisticated business hubs that power the global economy. Understanding the difference between the physical location and the business model is the first step to mastering the industry.

What is a Call Center? A Call Center (also called Contact Center nowadays) is the physical or virtual facility where the work happens. It is a centralized office used for receiving or transmitting a large volume of requests by telephone, chats or e-mails. It can also be a department inside an organization that takes care of handling the interaction with customers over phones or other channels.

What is a BPO? BPO stands for Business Process Outsourcing. This is the business model, not the building. It occurs when an organization contracts with an external service provider to perform an essential business function.

To understand how they fit together, imagine a major electronics company (let’s call it "The Tech Giant"). TechGiant is great at making laptops, but they don’t want to manage 5,000 employees answering calls from customers. That's when a BPO company (let´s call it "Awesome Service BPO") comes into play.

Let's do a breakdown:

• The Client: TechGiant (They own the product and services offered to consumers).
• The Customers: Are the actual people consuming The Tech Giant's products or services.
• The BPO: Awesome Service, the service provider (they are hired to handle the support).
• The Outcome: The BPO hires the staff, provides the building, and manages the day-to-day operations on behalf of TechGiant.

Here, we introduced a very important term: Client; it refers to the company (or companies) that hires BPO or Call Center services, and a Call Center can have as many clients as its capacity allows them to.

There are many types of industries a Call Center can handle, such as sales, retail, hospitality & travel, health, banking, and more.

Here's a visual map on how it all works:

In the previous image, we can see a BPO called AwesomeService BPO, which serves the customers of 3 different clients: TechGiant, Alpha Retail, and Biohealth Inc.