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 the customer service business process outsourcing (CS BPO) market as the delegation of customer service (CS) business process activities to support existing and potential clients to a third-party service provider. The services provided may include digital services, assisted channel services, technology and system integration, infrastructure, software development and design, reporting and analytics, and business process management.
Gartner defines finance and accounting (F&A) business process outsourcing (BPO) as the use of digital F&A technology solutions and managed services supplied by a third-party service provider. F&A BPO services provide transformation expertise and technology solutions that meet finance departments’ requirement to move from labor-intensive service delivery models to automation-intensive models supporting the digital transformation of finance operations. F&A BPO providers offer processing services and technology solutions for purchase to pay (P2P), order to cash (O2C) and record to report (R2R). BPO providers meet finance buyers’ needs to address improving process maturity at a competitive price. Providers offer processing and technology services to improve P2P, O2C and R2R processes, which offer buyers the ability to purchase transformation expertise and technology solutions to help their finance operations mature. At minimum, an F&A BPO provider processes finance activities on behalf of its customers via a delivery center network, often in low-cost locations, passing on cost savings in the form of labor arbitrage. Mature BPO offerings move beyond labor arbitrage efforts and offer buyers end-to-end intelligent processing capabilities through either proprietary or partner technology ecosystems, which are often cloud-based and are focused on reducing human dependencies in process workflows. Buyers benefit from these types of agreements by maturing their processes and adopting technologies that require minimum human intervention.