Gartner's definition of business process outsourcing (BPO) is the delegation of one or more IT-intensive business activities; specifically, BPO contracts that always include the outsourcing of business process administration to a third-party service provider, which may include outsourcing the infrastructure along with application maintenance and ownership. Customer management (CM) contact center BPO is the processes linking an organization with its existing and potential customers (such as marketing, sales and customer services), which can be categorized in four subsegments: *customer selection *customer acquisition, * customer retention *customer extension. The four subsegments should also consistently be executed across the following five primary channels: * telephony * business process as a service (BPaaS) * email response management * web/mobile chat * knowledge management for web and mobile-based self-service.
Gartner defines finance and accounting (F&A) business process outsourcing (BPO) as the use of third-party outsourcing service providers to handle transactional finance processes such as purchase-to-pay, order-to-cash and record-to-report. BPO service providers remotely connect to clients’ systems to carry out these operations. BPO service providers can also offer proprietary or partnered process automation solutions to enhance transactional processing efficiency. F&A BPO services are typically delivered from global delivery centers.