Although the global BPO industry has emerged less than ten years ago, its scale has developed rapidly and its connotation has changed greatly, which is unmatched by any industrial process in history. With the continuous penetration of computer and Internet technology into all fields of human social life, the service content and competitive market of BPO are constantly being created, derived and expanded. This is a dynamic growth process of a new industry, which is characterized by the way of constantly appearing, forming, combining and disappearing. Before discussing the BPO service market in detail, let's study several typical categories of BPO industry.
Various classifications of BPO service market
Many outsourcing service enterprises try to define the BPO service market through various methods. To sum up, BPO service market can be divided into two categories according to its characteristic parameters: category A is classified according to the nature of BPO service providers themselves; B is classified according to the characteristics and contents of business carried out by BPO service providers.
A. Classification of A.BPO service providers
GARTNER is one of the most famous and typical consulting companies that use this method to distinguish the BPO service market. According to GARTNER's research, there are seven different BPO service providers in the BPO service market:
1, information technology outsourcer
From the experience of foreign countries, a large number of BPO service providers come from the background of information technology (ITO) service providers, especially many large Indian companies (such as Wipro and Infosys). ) from the implementation of end-user software development in the United States. These participants have very rich and extensive IT outsourcing skills, services and solutions. Therefore, their entry into the BPO service market is a natural derivative and expansion of the original information technology service function. Although these players can handle many different process businesses, they prefer to pay close attention to one or two service areas. BPO service providers belonging to this category include ACS, Unisys, EDS, IBM, etc.
For example, with the acquisition of Unibase by 1996, ACS became one of the earliest information technology service providers to enter the BPO industry. Unisys entered the BPO field in early 2000. In 2002, IBM acquired the BPO department of PricewaterhouseCoopers and entered the profitable business process outsourcing market. EDS entered the BPO market relatively late in 2004. These early information technology service providers, except a few of them are still centers in developed countries (high-wage countries, such as the United States and Britain), most of them have quickly established offshore service centers in developing countries (low-wage countries, such as India and Ireland). IBM acquired Daksh, an Indian BPO company, four years ago to strengthen its strategic position in the global BPO field. EDS has also established its own BPO facilities in different countries and regions in the Asia-Pacific region.
2.BPO service consultant
This kind of BPO service provider is a comprehensive subcontracting business that provides BPO services through consulting analysis and information management. Consulting management experts provide customers with complete outsourcing strategic planning and are responsible for completing all outsourcing tasks. Therefore, by establishing such a relationship, customers no longer need to look for consultants and service providers separately, which reduces the work level and cost at the beginning of outsourcing.
Among all the classifications of BPO service providers, the role of BPO service consultant has changed greatly in the past few years. For example, the merger of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWCC) and IBM's global service department, and the acquisition of Andersen's BPO department by ACS are all changes in the role of traditional BPO consulting companies in cooperation with information technology service providers. Of course, there are some world-renowned large-scale BPO service consultants such as Accenture, Deloitte and Capgemini Ernst & Young. Young Bi Bo still retains the original BPO service consultant function.
3. Pure BPO service provider
Pure BPO service providers refer to companies whose income comes from business process outsourcing to provide services. Many foreign companies of this type are usually founded by venture capital firms. Examples of this are exulting and xchang.
Xchanging is a typical example of a venture capital company. Xchanging was founded on 1998 by General Atlantic Partners, a private investment company with assets of $5 billion. Now Xchanging's revenue has reached $60 million and it has more than 3,000 employees. The number of human resources services provided to customers and related enterprises has exceeded 250,000. In the past few years, many simple BPO service providers created by similar venture capital companies have mushroomed. Individual BPO service providers have squeezed into the ranks of large companies. For example, a report released by Nasdaq shows that exulting is one of the largest BPO service providers in the world, with its revenue exceeding 480 million dollars.
4. Process experts
This kind of BPO service provider is recognized by the market and has professional process knowledge and experience in specific fields. As far as this kind of BPO service providers are concerned, some have done a lot of useful exploration in information technology to provide innovative services to customers; There are also explorations and innovations based on assets or manpower. Information technology plays a very important role in completing business process outsourcing quickly and efficiently. Their competitiveness changes with different outsourcing business processes.
5. Industry experts
Some providers provide solution services for specific industries. These BPO service providers usually focus on outsourcing services that provide various functions for an industry. For example, CareScience and TriZetto are BPO service providers, providing a wide range of technical products and services for the healthcare industry. Similar WNS is a BPO industry service provider in India, providing services for airlines.
6. Offshore suppliers
With the changes of the global economy, the growth rate of the information technology outsourcing market once slowed down. Indian offshore service outsourcers have to find and discover new business opportunities. The rapid growth of BPO market provides these companies with a perfect alternative with multiple business directions. In April, 2002, Infosys announced the establishment of a BPO business company named Progeon, in which Infosys has a controlling stake, and the company also has an investment quota of 20 million US dollars from Citigroup. Similarly, Wipro, another information technology outsourcing giant in India, established Spectramind to engage in BPO business, and has now become an offshore BPO service provider (ITES) specializing in information technology driving in India.
7. Business Service Provider (BSP)
These service providers are derived and expanded from the traditional application service provider (ASP) model, and invade the BPO field. Because in the past, they only provided application management services, which was not enough to meet the needs of customers. Many important business requirements are not considered at all, which seriously threatens the survival of the traditional application service provider (ASP) model. In order to change this passive situation, application service providers (ASP) try to add and package more business process outsourcing content into their own application scope.
Integrating more functions into the services provided by application service providers (ASP) has formed a new concept of business model, called business service providers (BSP), which can provide customers with Internet-driven standard business processes. Business Service Provider (BSP) is responsible for the whole process of business process, which has greatly exceeded the ability of providing only technical solutions in the past.
The business model of ASPBSP has overlapped with the service content of BPO service providers in some areas, such as managing and supervising the application business: customer relationship management (CRM); Enterprise resource planning (ERP); Bill sending and email. Portera is a typical commercial service provider (BSP). The Campbell Project in California, USA, is that Portera Company provides a set of commercial service applications for enterprises in the service industry (law firms, architectural design institutes, public relations companies and advertising companies), and establishes a data processing center for this purpose. If these enterprises need it, Portera can provide them with time management, account management and financial accounting services. MetLedger is another good example in the field of finance and accounting, and PeopLeease is the project name of its human resources service. These companies are now business service providers, not just application service providers. Corio is another company that focuses on perverts, from managing and transmitting other people's software to providing commercial services.
B. Business classification implemented by BPO service providers
According to the business content classification method implemented by BPO service providers, there will be three different BPO companies:
1, a service provider dedicated to providing business support to customers.
Such companies provide front-end, and the types of services that customers pay attention to include database marketing, call center, online sales and marketing. The contact center outsourcing market is very crowded. At first, most of these service providers were non-professional, but soon they became familiar with and occupied the deep market of the industry in order to gain a competitive advantage. Nowadays, service providers who provide customer-centric business support can directly provide business-to-business (B2B) or other products-centric services to specialized customer groups.
The well-known company names of service providers providing specialized business support to customers are Convergys, Teletech, EDS and West Cooperation.
2. Service providers supporting special functions
Companies that can provide multifunctional services for specific industries fall into this category. However, there are few BPO companies that only serve one industry. Usually they serve at least two industries. Unisys, a BPO company, used to focus on insurance claims processing for a long time, but now they start to provide services for other industries, such as transportation and media.
3. Service providers supported by universal terminals
Such companies usually provide terminal and non-industrial process content services, such as human resources and administrative processing services. Typical examples of outsourcing human resources are Arinso and Hewitt Hewitt Associates, while Spherion mainly provides administrative processing services.
Composition of BPO service market
The high growth rate of BPO service market has attracted many new participants. Few new participants have the corresponding advantages and skills to complete BPO business alone, and other ways need to set foot in the BPO market through establishing strategic partnerships and strive for their due share. The following are various combinations found in the BPO competitive service market in the past few years:
1, business restructuring
Service providers entering the BPO market combine and reorganize with each other, or merge or acquire all enterprise businesses to form a new consortium to increase their service delivery capacity.
2. Industry experts lead in-depth fields.
Industry experts set up enterprises and set foot in the deep areas of the industry. Enter the corresponding BPO market from the business areas they are good at. Companies that used to focus on financial services can provide cross-industry financial services and expand the scope of service targets. Or extend your professional knowledge to new deep industries.
3. Enter the field of offshore services.
As early as 2000, some new providers entered the offshore business process outsourcing market, but the real offshore business process outsourcing business accelerated in 2002. At that time, most of the services provided were only a single task or project content based on operation, not a complete end-to-end BPO business.
4. The emergence of commercial service providers.
When the traditional application service provider (ASP) business model began to shrink, the provider tried to save ASP by adding business service content (including business process request, call center, transaction process capability and even providing complete process management) on the ASP platform. At the same time, BPO service providers began to invest in various platforms and basic technologies (such as website services, business process management software and workflow models), trying to realize standardized BPO services, and then realize a one-to-many service delivery model. This new model is still developing and improving. However, the first ray of success can be seen in some narrow business areas and service processes that are easy to automate (such as credit rating, welfare registration, travel and reimbursement, etc.). ).
Strategic measures to become the winner of BPO service market
We can predict that the organizational form of BPO service market will change greatly in the near future. On the one hand, the behavior of reorganization, merger and strategic partnership between service providers will increase greatly; On the other hand, many new suppliers will continue to enter this BPO service market. However, in the long run, not all enterprises entering this market can survive. Therefore, in order to achieve fundamental success in long-term operation, BPO service providers must follow the correct strategic guidelines. The following is the famous BPO Institute (Schroeder Salomon Smith Barney). In order to make service providers become winners in the BPO service market, they have identified three strategic measures that BPO service providers must take for long-term operation:
1. Become a provider of end-to-end outsourcing solutions.
BPO service providers who follow this strategic measure must be able to provide all services from consulting, updating management mode to process. Such a company can not only develop most systematic services within the enterprise, but also have the ability to establish partnerships to achieve certain process services. Therefore, they must submit a one-stop service goal to their customers. This kind of BPO service contract must be signed by the senior managers of BPO service providers (whether private enterprises or listed companies). Therefore, for BPO service providers, the most important ability is that high-level personnel within the enterprise should have strong sales skills and abilities.
2. Become an expert in service field or customer process.
In order to succeed in the BPO service market, BPO service providers should choose at least one BPO service field and become experts in customer service or process, such as human resources or financial accounting.
3. Become an expert to meet the functional needs of customers.
In the increasingly competitive BPO service market, service providers must choose and implement the best practices in their industry fields. Only in this way, the employer can choose the best practitioners in the relevant business fields and outsource some special functions to this BPO service provider. Insurance industry, financial accounting industry and health care industry have been recognized as the three major business areas of BPO service market, which need a lot of back-office services. Obviously, in these areas, BPO service providers with experts who can meet the functional needs of customers will greatly reduce costs and obtain outsourcing orders.