Cloud BPO – Why Should Bpos Look at Cloud Shift as a Growth Strategy?

Around 2000, I had a conversation with a spend management solution provider about the underlying technology infrastructure that they use to deliver solutions.

He told me that they are migrating their offerings to cloud-only model.

I was surprised about the move and asked him why they looked at a cloud-only model. He mentioned that the industry would not have any options but to move to the cloud in a few years. They predicted that all enterprise applications would move to the cloud very soon.

I wasn’t convinced about their arguments. I felt that cloud shift would possibly allow them to acquire more SMEs as a part of their portfolio.

Shift to 2023.

There is a high level of cloud penetration in the enterprise applications space, while the business process outsourcing segment with low cloud penetration is catching up with the cloud shift.

The cloud-shift in the Business Process Outsourcing segment was again accelerated by the enterprise customer experience segments. Enterprises outsourcing customer engagement and customer services wanted a lot of value from their vendors.

While the premise of BPO in the early days were based on full-time equivalents, it slowly started shifting towards providing value. This was when they began adding multi-channel and omnichannel capabilities. After which, they started integrating with existing IT systems to provide single view of the customers across the entire customer journey. They add AI and ML engines to provide intelligence to the decision-making process currently.

Why Should BPOs Look at the Cloud Strategy?

There are multiple reasons why you should adopt a cloud Bpo strategy. Some of them are:

Accessibility – Cloud makes it accessible for your agents to access the platform anywhere. Your agents only need a device with the Internet and a browser to access your platform and provide the necessary service.

Lower Capex – with cloud, you can avoid costs related to licenses, hardware, installation, maintenance, and technical support. Besides, you don’t have to pay for all the features like integrations, intelligence, analytics, and infrastructural needs like redundancy, availability, scalability, and security. The cloud provider would handle all of these, and you pay based on your usage. Now, you can setup and run technology with a different Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) model.

Scalability – you can ramp up and down your resources, and it can be as early as six hours to ramp up and one hour to ramp down. This would allow you to quickly add processes for your existing customers or new customers. You don’t have to get involved in long-term contracts or minimum commitments with the move to cloud contact center solution providers.

Business Continuity – if you own your infrastructure, the amount of skills needed to manage your infrastructure is enormous and expensive. Moreover, that is not your critical skill, and it would take away precious time of yours from your core business. You can be assured of the best security protocols, compliance to different standards, and redundancy to manage any unforeseen calamities with cloud providers. You can expect >99% uptime of your cloud platform.

Better Innovation – allows easier integration, allows better collection, analysis, display, and use of data, and builds artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities quickly. This would help in providing additional value and making decisions.

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Making a shift to the cloud gives your BPO major competitiveness in agility, collaboration, and access to data. BPOs need systems that can quickly respond to change lest they face the risk of failure – Cloud platforms can bring that nimbleness to the table. Overall, cloud platforms make BPOs responsive, innovative, and financially successful.

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