A BPO is the acronym for Business Process Outsourcing.
"Business process outsourcing (BPO) is a subset of outsourcing that involves the contracting of the operations and responsibilities of specific business functions or processes to a third-party service provider. It is typically categorized into back office outsourcing - which includes internal business functions such as human resources or finance and accounting, and front office outsourcing - which includes customer-related services such as contact center services.
A BPO that is contracted outside a company's country is called offshore outsourcing."
The above mentioned definition may sound so technical to you. To make it simple, BPO is the process of hiring another company to handle business activities for them ranging from data processing, back office support, recruitment, payroll, sales, customer service or technical support, to telemarketing and the like.
A Call Center, on the other hand, is a form of BPO that deals with inbound and outbound calls providing sales, customer service, technical support, telemarketing, & phone surveys for their clients.
In short, all call centers are BPO's but not all BPO's are call centers.
You might ask why do they (the clients) hire another company to do these business activities for them, especially for offshore outsourcing? The main answer to that question is "Cost Savings". We can't deny the fact that labor in the Philippines is much cheaper compared to that of the U.S. Access to lower cost economies through offshoring is called "labor arbitrage" which is generated by the wage gap between industrialized and developing nations.
