By: Phil Smith

More businesses are choosing to use a Business Process Outsourcer (BPO), for their front-end operations, with 55 percent currently outsourcing part of their customer care operations and 47 percent expecting to increase their outsourcing by the end of next year, states a McKinsey survey. Using a BPO enables these companies to focus on their core competencies while leveraging the expertise and technologies of a third-party provider. However, the chief driver in outsourcing Customer Experience (CX) is no longer cost or efficiency, with 44 percent of service leaders now looking to BPO partnerships to enhance CX outcomes, according to Gartner.

There’s been a marked shift towards a value-added strategic partnership which is seeing clients request Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as customer satisfaction scores (CSAT), efficiency gains or demonstrable increases in revenue. It’s a trend observed by the UK Contact Centre Outsourcing Report 2025, which notes fees are now being directly tied to outcome-based results rather than hours or ticket volumes, so that instead of looking to reduce cost to serve by 10% and a response window of 24 hours, clients are looking for improved Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and new revenue opportunities during calls.

Yet delivering this value-led proposition using traditional call centre operations is no mean feat. CX BPOs use a plethora of tools including their own routing platforms, Workforce Management (WFM)/Workforce Engagement (WEM) systems, and Quality Assurance (QA) systems to evaluate and analyze performance. It’s a convoluted tech stack that often results in disconnected, inconsistent reporting and a lack of real-time visibility.

Siloed Data

For BPOs to offer customers an omichannel customer experience, handling customer interactions over voice, email, chat, social media and web self-service portals, there will typically be a series of proprietary platforms from vendors like Genesys, Cisco, Avaya, Amazon Connect, NICE/inContact to handle specific channels. Each platform will have its own reporting tools and these do not talk to each other. So, for a BPO with one vendor’s contact center in Europe and another in North America, likely using different vendor technology, getting a consolidated global view is extremely difficult.

The only way of amalgamating the data from each platform is to manually export and combine or via a complex data warehouse project. Then there are the integration challenges to consider, such as aligning timestamp formats, merging agent IDs that differ across systems, and reconciling interaction IDs, all of which creates a labor-intensive and error-prone process. As a consequence, reports then tend to be delayed or contain incomplete information, creating a distortion of the accurate picture.

The lack of seamless multi-platform integrations means BPOs can’t easily compare performance or share best practices across units. Moreover, maintaining separate reporting silos is costly and limits agility – any change (like a new KPI) has to be implemented in multiple systems – and it’s a situation that’s getting more difficult to resolve as more technologies such as AI chatbots and analysis are added to the mix.

Needless to say, platform vendors have very little appetite to unify data from other systems. Their raison d’etre is to focus on their own ecosystems and to improve their functionality through the addition of AI, machine learning, and analytics to assess how effectively these interactions are handled and to improve customer outcomes. But this doesn’t help the BPO who is struggling with a fragmented technology stack and needs to be able to collate and turn the data available to them into meaningful insights.

The Need for Better Visibility

The drive to deliver value also means the BPO needs to be able to contextualise those insights. Typically, tools split real-time and historic analysis into two separate streams, which means the business can’t correlate what’s happened now against what happened earlier. Siloed reporting can also result in inconsistencies where the numbers between real-time versus final reports do not correlate, so there is no single version of truth.

Ideally, the BPO needs real-time dashboards that provide a holistic view, covering not just raw queue stats but potentially customer journey insights and sentiment, so the contact centre can rebalance workloads or assist a struggling agent. They also need historical analysis in order to pull up trend reports or slice-and-dice the data, but that needs to be made available on demand, without waiting for overnight processing. For the BPO, this visibility is crucial to prevent small issues from becoming problems and to avoid the prospect of missed SLAs.

There’s also the problem of differing metrics. Typically, a CX BPO will provide agent level KPIs such as average handling time (AHT) of a call, first contact resolution (FCR) to show how many calls were resolved on the first pass, and after call work (ACW) to determine the amount of effort expended post-call. They’ll also look to track CSAT and will quality-assess the accuracy and compliance of agent interactions. On top of these, there are broader metrics that look at escalation rates, repeat contact rates, and agent utilisation rates, and these will all be measured against predetermined thresholds set out in the SLA.